ABSTRACT
As in government, there was a good deal of continuity between the legal systems of pre-and post-conquest England. William I and his successors preserved the Anglo-Saxon system of shires and shire courts, hundreds and hundred courts and they also accepted important elements of English custom. Partly this was a question of pragmatism: the system worked well. But the stress upon continuity suited the Norman kings’ view of their own legitimacy, too: they were the rightful heirs of Edward the Confessor, they argued, and part of their inheritance was the extant system of law. In the so-called Laws of William the Conqueror (probably a twelfth-century document, reflecting the laws it was thought William had made), it was proclaimed that ‘all shall have and hold the law of King Edward in respect of their lands and all their possessions, with the addition of those decrees I have ordained for the welfare of the English people’. And, at his coronation, one of the promises made by Henry I was to restore to his people ‘the law of King Edward, with such emendations as my father made to it with the counsel of his barons’.1
