When the lawyers who taught the English common law in the Inns of Court in the later Middle Ages constructed a lecture course for apprentices which consisted of an exposition of, and commentary on, the most important legislation of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, most of the legislation they chose came from the reign of King Edward I. That course also, however, included three statutes that belonged to the reign of Edward's father, King Henry III. These were the 1225 reissue of Magna Carta, the Provisions of Merton of 1236 and the Statute of Marlborough of 1267. The singling out of these three particular pieces of legislation from Henry III's reign as of enduring importance parallels their treatment within the textual tradition of the statute books. Statute books were beginning to be copied in large numbers by the final decade of the thirteenth century and the first decade of the fourteenth century and contained mainly the major and minor statutes of the reign of Edward I and various other non-statutory but useful texts. Magna Carta, the Provisions of Merton and the Statute of Marlborough were not quite the only statutes of the reign of Henry III to be included in such volumes. It was not uncommon to include the quasi-statutory Dictum of Kenilworth of 1266 and the Leap Year ordinance of 1256 as well. Sometimes other statutory texts are found there too.