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6 - Treatises, Tracts and Compilations

from Part I - Legal Contexts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

By
Don C. Skemer
Edited by
Candace Barrington  and
Sebastian Sobecki
Candace Barrington
Affiliation:
Central Connecticut State University
Sebastian Sobecki
Affiliation:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands
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Summary

English law was influenced by many legal traditions: Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Frankish and Norman law and custom; feudal and seignorial law; borough customs, mercantile law and guild regulations; and Roman and canon law taught at English and continental universities. Common law became a recognisable legal system in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the expansion of royal justice created a need for unofficial treatises, tracts and compilations in Latin and Anglo-Norman (Law French). These legal texts served a diverse readership of judges, lawyers, religious houses, prelates, landowners, manorial stewards, urban corporations, merchants and others needing legal knowledge. Commercial book production in Greater London and beyond resulted in a proliferation of legal manuscripts, from plain scribal copies for working lawyers to deluxe illuminated copies for high-status patrons. Supplementing these were manuscripts copied for their own use by lawyers, clerks and law students, especially after the rise of the Inns of Court from the 1340s. Scribal transmission of individually executed copies, usually written on parchment in varying grades of Anglicana script (an English book cursive of documentary origin) gave way from the 1480s to lawbook printing and publishing on paper.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature , pp. 66 - 80
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Further Reading

Baker, John H., ‘The Books of Common Law’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 3: 1400–1557, ed. Hellinga, Lotte and Trapp, J. B., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 411–32.Google Scholar
Baker, John H.The Oxford History of the Laws of England, vol. 6: 1483–1558, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Holdsworth, W. S., Sources and Literature of English Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925.Google Scholar
Plucknett, T. F. T., Early English Legal Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958.Google Scholar
Ramsay, Nigel, ‘Law’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 2: 1100–1400, ed. Morgan, Nigel and Thomson, Rodney M., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 250–90.Google Scholar
Winfield, Percy H., The Chief Sources of English Legal History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925.Google Scholar

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