In the popular ‘Prophecies of Merlin’ written at the end of Henry I's reign, contemporaries had no difficulty in identifying Henry with the Lion of Justice at whose roar ‘the towers of Gaul shall shake and the island Dragons tremble’. In the dark days after Henry's death it was the law and order he had maintained for which he was remembered. The nature of that justice is an important subject in itself, and it is also crucial for assessing the developments of the later twelfth century. It is, however, a subject which has been little studied, though the evidence is relatively plentiful. The following chapter first looks at the various sources of evidence, considers the scope and administration of royal justice, and finally looks at the question of how far royal rights were delegated to subjects.

The surviving evidence about justice takes very different forms. There are reports of cases relating to religious communities in their chronicles and cartularies. There are royal writs and charters arising from lawsuits and now collected in the volumes of royal documents, the Regesta, and there are charters issued by lay lords recording legal decisions. Many of the relevant excerpts were collected in M. M. Bigelow's Placita Anglo-Normannica published in 1879, a new edition of which is badly needed. There is also a good deal of incidental information about royal justice in the 1130 pipe roll. Finally, there are the legal texts compiled in the early twelfth century.