The law of England underwent major changes under the energetic leadership of the Plantagenet kings. This scholarly work traces and outlines this most fascinating and actually entertaining period in legal history.

Before the acts chronicled here, the business of law enforcement in all its various forms, both civil and criminal, was a rather haphazard and local affair. Magical ordeals, often administered by the clergy, and probably fixed by them to reach what they thought the proper outcome, were a major method of trial. Noblemen could fend off charges by their inferiors by swearing they didn't do it, and finding enough people to swear that they believed 'em. Disputes between nobles were as often as not settled by the sword, in either actual battle or ritual combat.

The Plantagenet kings made this imperfect system obsolete, not by legislating it out of existence, but by offering a superior product. They introduced the grand and petit jury, whose ultimate origins are obscure, but which may trace back to the Scandinavian ancestors of the Normans. New forms of litigation were set up beside the old ones, only these led to the royally instituted jury rather than the old forms of trial by oaths, magic, or battle.

And, having this parallel system in place, attorneys were careful to frame their pleadings so as to bring their litigation within the ambit of the new trials, rather than the old ones. These basic legal reforms, helped along by certain legal fictions made necessary to achieve the desired result, became the foundation of a legal system more suited to a national state with a central royal government, rather than the patchwork jurisdictions of feudalism.

This fascinating story is told in all its detail in these old but still intriguing books.

Absolutely no laymen, and few lawyers (only those nerdy, dweeby law professor types) could or would read this book. I was required to read it thirty years ago in law school. I was surprised to see it still in print. Granted, a lawyer should know what the ancient English forms of action were, but not in this detail (even with charts!). Only thing I can imagine worse or more boring would be to have sat through Professor Maitland's lectures, from which this book was derived. On the other hand, we have too many lawyers as it is. Maybe all would-be law students should read this before they applyy--could cut down on applications!

F.W. Maitland is a genius at showing how the present got here out of the dim past. To do so, he takes the reader to an ancient age when the "common law" that today we take for granted was still forming, and where the modern reader can barely recognize--let alone comprehend--the assumptions according to which the English people of a millennium ago lived their lives, ran their businesses, and settled their disputes. A subject seeking to right a wrong had few choices: submit to such archaic processes as trial by battle, trial by ordeal, or wager of law, on the one hand; or petition the crown for special, personal relief. The sovereign powers of judging and legislating were still undifferentiated, so obtaining judicial relief from the crown was an extraordinary process, almost as cumbersome as enacting general legislation. This book tells how the extraordinary process of royal justice evolved into the ordinary manner of settling private disputes, eventually supplanting the more barbaric forms of justice that previously held sway (although those forms were not fully abolished until the nineteenth century).

To commence a lawsuit in order to resolve a private dispute may seem perfectly routine today, but it was a fairly new concept in ancient England--at least at the level of the national government--and it did not grow up overnight. Ancient justice was usually a private, local matter, where the feudal lord held court and physical or economic power was often more important than law or right. The idea gradually developed that certain matters fell within the "king's peace," where the central government would consistently administer a generally applied policy without respect to wealth or power. These cases were at first exceptions to the rule of local justice, and so the "forms of action" grew up as the precise technical procedures by which the petitioner invoked the royal writ against local feudal lord's court. The local nobility was naturally jealous of any royal encroachment, so the forms of action were narrow and technical, and any deviation from the precise formula was fatal to the petitioner's case. Gradually, more and more cases fell within the king's peace, the writs grew more flexible, and--over the next half a millennium--the right of petitioning the central government for the redress of grievances became so common that the fledgling United States recognized it in the first amendment. But that process was a long slow painful one, and Maitland unmasks it with great care and detail, so that the evolution of an ancient and alien system of justice into the familiar modern system is evident to the modern reader.

If you are interested in the evolution of the English system of parliamentary government from the feudal era to the present, I also recommend Maitland's "Constitutional History of England."