86 
Indiana University Studies 
Sources of Law. The sources of the law which the courts 
applied in this period were the Anglo-Saxon common law, 
or dooms, as developed by a French-speaking court ; the canon 
law, as introduced by the Roman Catholic Church, especially 
in probate, divorce, and admiralty matters ; Roman law, as 
applied in maxims, method, spirit, logic, and a few principles ; 
and enacted law. Any enacted law of the period was not 
enacted by Parliament, for tho Simon de Montfort captured 
the king and founded the House of Commons in the reign of 
Henry III, it did not actually begin for thirty years. The 
enacted law of England in this period was law promulgated 
by the king with the advice of the Curia Regis. It consisted 
of four documents: Magna Charta (1215), Forest Law 
(1217), Provisions of Merton (1236), and the Provisions of 
Marlborough, enacted during the reign of John and Henry 
III, besides the Constitutions of Clarendon and other assizes 
of Henry II. Magna Charta established the rights of the 
church, the barons, freemen, and villeins, gave the guaran- 
tee of due process of law, and provided for taxation only by 
consent. All of the rest of the law was judge-made law, 
both substantive law and procedure. The judges developed 
a real common law. 
Lawyers. A class of professional lawyers grew up in this 
period. They were probably mostly ecclesiastics and versed 
in the canon and Roman law and yet they were the chief in- 
struments in moulding the new common law of England. A 
particular class of lawyers, known as sergeants-at-law (mem- 
bers of the Order of the Coif), had a monopoly of the practice 
in the Common Pleas, and this monopoly continued until the 
time of Victoria. Glanville (Henry IPs chief justiciar) 
wrote the first English law book. It was in Latin and was 
wholly Roman law except as it treated of legal procedure. 
Bracton, an ecclesiastic but king’s justice in the time of Henry 
III, wrote another treatise in Latin in which he filled in the 
gaps in English case law with Roman law. 
