1 - THE REPUTATION OF THE ROYAL JUSTICES

Summary

A monk in the mid twelfth century took note of the progress of his day; among the advances he observed was the growth of ‘so many kinds of professions … varieties of positions and posts’. Certainly the appearance of professional civil servants was a noteworthy change in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. A significant group of English civil servants are the royal justices in those crucial years for the growth of the common law, the time between the writing of the two great legal treatises: Glanvill, written c. 1187–9, and Bracton, once thought to have been written in the late 1250s, but now known to date in its earliest version from the 1220s and 1230s. Those years saw the appearance of professional judges in England's royal courts.

Great barons, bishops and abbots served Henry II, his sons Richard I and John, and his grandson Henry III as judges from time to time, particularly as itinerant justices in their own counties. Others who might be termed the king's ‘men-of-all-work’, serving him in the chancery, at the Exchequer, or as sheriffs also sat occasionally on the bench. By the last ten years of Henry II, however, we can make out some royal servants who were beginning to concentrate on the work of justice and who must be regarded as forerunners of a professional judiciary.