This book presents a study of the evolution of a professional judiciary in medieval England through the careers of forty-nine royal justices from the last decade of Henry II until 1239. Those years were crucial for the growth of the common law, producing the two legal treatises Glanvill and Bracton. The period also represents a critical phase in the growth of a professional civil service for England. Professor Turner's study plots the shifts from unspecialized multipurpose royal servants to corps of specialists, concentrating on one sphere. By using the method known as prosopography, the...

This book covers the period from the Reformation to the end of Lord Eldon's Chancellorship when the modern law of charity had taken a definite shape. Mr Jones shows how the contemporary religious, economic and social pressures moulded the substantive law and illustrates the importance of procedural considerations in defining the limits of legal charity.

Professor Milsom works out a fresh view of the beginnings of the common law concerning land. The received picture depends upon progressive assumptions: key words began with their later meanings; the law began with abstract ideas of property; a tenant's title to his tenement was never subject to his lord's control; the lord had no discretion, only the power to decide disputes according to external criteria; jurisdiction in that sense was all the lord lost as royal remedies developed; and all the tenant gained was better protection of unaltered rights. It is a picture of procedural changes...

The history of the family has become an area of great interest, yet the property arrangements entered into upon marriage, a crucial aspect of the process of familial wealth transmission and distribution in the landed classes in early modern England, have never been systematically studied. In the light of evidence provided by hitherto unused family muniments, Dr Bonfield analyses the legal, social and economic aspects of these settlements, and discusses the development and impact of the strict settlement.

Although the Englishmen who crossed the Irish Sea from 1169 onward brought with them their own speech and legal code, the credit for the creation of a firm basis for the alien English Law and legal institutions belongs to King John, when his accession united the Lordship of Ireland with the English Crown. Dr Hand begins his study of English Law in Ireland by tracing its development up to 1290. He confines his detailed analysis, however, to the years 1290 1324, considering the influence of statute law and Irish custom on, and the position of the native Irishman under English Law. This period...

Sir Julius Caesar was the servant of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, serving as Judge of the High Court of Admiralty, Master of Requests, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Master of the Rolls and Privy Councillor. He also sat in the later Elizabethan parliaments and all but one in James' reign. Throughout his long and active career, Caesar preserved hundreds of volumes of his papers. They are largely in the custody of the British Museum and the text of this edition has been taken from BM Lansdowne MS 125. At the end of the sixteenth century English civilians were pressed to defend themselves...

A comprehensive elucidation of the legal historical foundations of a major contemporary public institution, the statutory tribunal.

In the nineteenth century, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the supreme appellate tribunal for the British Empire, held sway over the lives, liberties and property of more than a quarter of the world's inhabitants, for it had the duty of hearing and determining appeals from some 150 colonial, Indian, Admiralty, Vice-Admiralty, prize, ecclesiastical and consular jurisdictions. It also had to dispose of certain patent and copyright matters and appeals from the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man and was obliged to hear and report on 'any... other matter whatsoever' that the Crown...

This book uses a wide range of primary sources - legal, literary and demographic - to provide a radical reassessment of eighteenth-century marriage. It disproves the widespread assumption that couples married simply by exchanging consent, demonstrating that such exchanges were regarded merely as contracts to marry and that marriage in church was almost universal outside London. It shows how the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 was primarily intended to prevent clergymen operating out of London's Fleet prison from conducting marriages, and that it was successful in so doing. It also refutes...

The six chapters of this book were originally delivered as lectures at the University of Cambridge. They were commissioned in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Frederic William Maitland (1850 1906). With the exception of the first chapter, the lectures in this volume were printed for the first time in 1958 with the help of the Selden Society. It is this edition which is reproduced here. In his preface, T. F. T. Plucknett observes that the theme of his lectures was 'to learn from Maitland's writings, not merely the results he acquired but the method and inspiration of...