When Henry II became King of England in 1154 he faced a situation of almost insuperable difficulty. The country had been wrecked by 19 years of violent civil war (think Sudan or Congo for modern parallels) The warring baronial armies had not gone away. How could law and order be restored when the country was a network of local loyalties? A patchwork of legal jurisdictions-Shire courts, Hundreds, Manorial courts, even Church courts with their own law, seemed to govern every aspect of life. Yet Henry and his jurists came up with a solution, as much by feeling their way toward it as by grand design. It was called Common Law, and it eventually resulted in a new legal system for a new sort of country, which came to claim more loyalty than the local ones that that had gone before
So what is Common Law? And how does it differ from top-down Statute Law proclaimed, for example by Emperors like Justinian or Napoleon? Common Law grew from judicial decisions. Judges settled individual cases; later judges followed the precedents. Over time a body of law emerged that no one person had designed, yet everyone could increasingly rely upon.
Henry was taking a radical step. In the Middle Ages most Kings and other rulers dictated their Laws and expected obedience, enforcing them with armed force where necessary. Henry certainly did this: but he also saw his duty to enforce the new Common Law as well. He was no philosopher king. But he understood something important: if everyone in England was subject to the same law, prosperity and order would follow. It was a bold idea. The difficult part was making it real. In the next part of the series we shall see how this remarkable man accomplished that.
[1] Code of Justinian – Wikipedia
[2] Napoleonic Code – Wikipedia
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