ABSTRACT
The Angevin reforms thus greatly increased the business of the king's courts. This growth may represent not just a higher proportion of a constant number of cases. Some men believed that litigiousness had increased, and various developments, including the reforms themselves, may have contributed to rising litigation. 1 However, whilst the royal remedies were often popular, the focusing of business on the royal courts helped to concentrate resentment of injustice upon royal administration. Criticisms of royal justices for their corruption and their lowly social origins were not new, but they almost certainly increased during the Angevin period. Ralph of Coggeshall's ‘Vision of Thurkill’, written in 1206, admits of a royal justice that he was ‘famous throughout England among high and low for his overflowing eloquence and experience in the law’, but criticises his avarice in taking gifts from both parties in cases, and details with black enjoyment the pains he was suffering in Hell following his intestate and apparently unrepentant death. 2
