ABSTRACT
THE HUNDRED and fifty years between the Norman Conquest and the Great Charter carried the English people from the blood feud and the ordeal to trial by jury, from the justice administered by peasant suitors in their immemorial local courts to trial before royal judges conscious of an omnipresent king. This is a period which has attracted the attention of many scholars on both sides of the Atlantic and, although this is not the time or place to estimate their individual contributions to our present state of knowledge, it is not possible to omit a word of gratitude to some of them. Felix Liebermann’s devoted labour on the texts of our old laws has given twentieth-century scholars a new springboard for their studies. As Maitland said while the work was in progress, “Lagam Eadwardi nobis reddit.” 1 He was working on individual texts through the ’eighties and ’nineties of the last century and his massive edition of the Anglo-Saxon laws appeared between 1903 and 1916. Before any of Liebermann’s work had appeared, Melville Madison Bigelow, one of the founders of the Boston University Law School, had in 1879 and 1880 produced two pioneer works on Anglo-Norman law which are still of value today, a collection of cases which has not yet been superseded and a commentary on procedure based at every point on his study of individual pleas. 2 This was heroic work, done before Domesday Book had been adequately annotated and before modern work on the pipe rolls and the plea rolls of the Bench and Eyres had been begun, while twelfth-century charters and final concords were still merely material for the genealogist. But of all the eminent workers in this field the greatest and most sympathetic to the modern scholar is Frederic William Maitland whose classic History of English Law, done with the support of Sir Frederick Pollock and published in 1895 3 is still the starting point for the enquirer. The modern scholar humbly plodding along in his footsteps often feels that he can merely add a footnote to 2that tremendous survey. Nevertheless, there still remains record evidence to be searched that even Maitland’s omnivorous energy did not reach and the concentrated interest of two generations on the centuries immediately before and after 1066 has created a corpus of knowledge which has revolutionised the subject. The History of English Law is, moreover, more concerned with the thirteenth century than the twelfth. Bracton’s Notebook and Bracton’s Treatise and the growing volume of the English common law fascinated Maitland and drew him quickly over the earlier post-Conquest generations. His mind loved to play on “those few men who were gathered at Westminster round Pateshull and Raleigh and Bracton” and “were penning writs that would run in the names of kingless commonwealths on the other shore of the Atlantic Ocean.” 4 Today, we turn to Ralf and Richard Basset in Henry I’s reign; to Henry II and Rannulf Glanville; to Hubert Walter and Geoffrey fitz Peter at the end of the century; and even to King John and Simon of Pattishall in the years before the Great Charter.
