The relationship between the jurisdictions of local courts and central courts in late-medieval and early-modern England remains largely unexplored. It is nevertheless important to an understanding of the development of the common law because of the prevailing notion that the great increase in litigation in the royal courts in the early Tudor period was connected with a decline in the use made of local courts. A massive transfer of business to the centralised royal courts might have affected the common law in ways other than the purely numerical, in that it could have brought a reception of legal ideas and remedies already well known out in the country. On that footing, the appearance of new kinds of action in the central courts at this period may represent transfers of jurisdiction rather than changes in legal thinking.

It is extremely difficult to test such assumptions. There is no way of surveying all local courts in the Tudor period, since most of the records have been lost; we find glimpses of their operation in the central records, in proceedings for error and false judgment, but insufficient material on which to build a reliable impression of levels and types of business across the country generally. In the nature of things, the courts whose records have been preserved were those untypical courts which continued to flourish when others went by the board.