ABSTRACT
The Common Law is the body of legal rules that was developed by the royal courts in England from the last quarter of the twelfth century onward, and applied by them within England on a nationwide basis. No authoritative written summary of these rules was compiled, though many of them were embodied in the written judgments of the courts, and they were also summarized and discussed in medieval legal treatises. The Common Law was so called to distinguish its rules from rules of purely local application. The term Common Law is also used to refer in a general way to the legal institutions that are or were characteristic of English law. In the later Middle Ages, these include the use of courts of a particular general type; the initiation of civil litigation by writs of a limited range of standard types issued by the king’s chancery; the initiation of most criminal proceedings through indictment at the king’s suit; the use of jury trial for fact finding in civil and criminal proceedings; and the existence of a bifurcated lay legal profession with a recognized professional expertise but no connection with the law faculties of the universities.
