The reign of Henry II has long been regarded, and rightly, as a period of major importance in the history of English law. For most legal historians it is the period when it first becomes possible to recognise the existence of an English ‘Common Law’: both a set of national legal institutions bringing law and justice to the whole of England, and a body of legal rules applicable over the whole or almost the whole of England. The clearest overall view of this newly emergent English ‘Common Law’ is to be found in the pages of the legal treatise known as Glanvill, which was completed, though not necessarily all written, in the final years of Henry's reign, between 1187 and 1189. Within a few years of the death of Henry II we get the first direct evidence for the operation of the new Common Law in the earliest surviving plea-roll records of the king's courts, the first of which dates from 1194. Our picture of the process by which that Common Law began to emerge is much less clear, since it depends on scattered and fragmentary evidence that is difficult to interpret. It is with that process of emergence that this paper will be mainly concerned.

Let me start, however, by reviewing both what had been achieved and what had not been achieved by the end of Henry II's reign. This is not meant to sound teleological, as though there was some grand plan gradually being put into effect by the king and his advisers.