FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE – FROM BRACTON TO BLACKSTONE

In the section where writs dealing with the question of personal status are explained, the author of the late twelfth-century English law tract known as Glanvill (c. 1187) goes into a long discussion about the division between the free and the unfree status. The detailed treatment is viewed by an influential editor of this work as ‘some lengthy observations … which are outside the limited purpose of a commentary on writs’. But, if anything, such an elaborate treatment shows the great importance the author attached to the division which he might have regarded as fundamental to the law of personal status.

What Glanvill failed to spell out with the crispness of a categorical declaration was succinctly expressed a few decades later by an able hand known by the name of Bracton. Students and practitioners of the common law in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries must have admired the penetrating insight and clarity of expression of this celebrated author when they were reading the following passage from his De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae (c. 1220–50):

The author of Fleta (c. 1290) was no doubt deeply impressed by the cardinal importance of this division. Accordingly, its very first chapter was devoted to introducing this principle.