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I think they could be in two types of records, depending on whether the person was a serf or a freeman.
Serfs were under the jurisdiction of the manorial court, and cases would be recorded in the manorial court rolls. These dealt with minor infractions like letting your cow wander into the fields, as well as land transfers and labor services. In these last two cases there might be genealogies going back three or four generations, if it was necessary to trace landholding or the type of tenure, villeinage/copyhold or socage/freehold. Only a small fraction of manorial court rolls survive, mainly, from manors belonging to the king or to monasteries. They would be either in the county record offices or in the Public Record Office in London (at Kew, near Richmond). They aren't easy to read. They're in Latin, very abbreviated, often faded or damaged. I'm not very good at Latin, I can read a bit with the help of a Latin-English dictionary, so I have a lot of difficulty with court rolls. However, each entry starts with a list of the jurors, the leading men of the manor, and these are usually pretty clear and easy to read.
Many of the surviving records have been used by local historians, so you would probably be best off with a local history, if one exists for the place you're interested in. There are a few good ones, many not so good. Here are a few good ones:
Life, death and marriage in a medieval parish, Zvi Razi, (Halesowen, Worcestershire)
The Midland Peasant, W.G. Hoskins (Wigston Magna, Leicestershire)
Studies in Manorial History, Ada Elizabeth Levett (manors in western Herfordshire belonging to St Albans Abbey)
For a start you could check:
http://www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/
There's a link for Sources, and Manorial records under that. There are some manorial court records online, and there's some information about where to find others.
If the person was a freeman, then the case would be tried in the common law courts, in the Court of Common Pleas, I think. These records haven't been used much by historians, because they are fiendishly difficult to work with. They're in medieval French and not very well catalogued. And usually a case will drag on for years, so you can read about one hearing but not find out what happened.
Tell me a few of the parishes you're interested in and I could look around to see if there are any surviving court rolls or if there's a local history of the place.
Vance
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