Hope reposed in the twenty-one-year-old Henry of Anjou. His ascension to the throne in 1154 was anticipated in words Shakespeare would later echo: ‘England, long numbed by mortal chill, now you grow warm by the heat of a new sun.’ The thaw came just in time. Much of the kingdom, including the legal system, was in jeopardy, and justice was administered in a haphazard and arbitrary manner. The proliferation of laws and the combination of Anglo-Saxon and Norman practices had led to overlapping jurisdictions, delay and confusion. The recent troubles had left courts prey to subversion by powerful noblemen, who were often laws unto themselves in their localities. Increasingly, subjects, despairing of the maze of feudal, communal and ecclesiastical courts and laws, placed their hope in royal intervention. The king alone could deliver them from the legal mire. This king could and would.

The young and vigorous Henry II had a kingdom to pacify, disputes that had grown gangrenous during the civil war to resolve, revenue to raise, and a continental empire to run. He had also to be a law-maker and law-enforcer. He took very seriously his coronation oath to ensure justice and peace for the realm. Henry had no need to invent completely new laws and procedures, but to consolidate, and to build upon proven existing ones. He abolished nothing, but succeeded in combining all the local customary laws into a law common to the country as a whole. The transformation was effected by setting up an alternative system of justice, in which old practices were rationalised and selected precedents fused together with ‘the transmuting touch of intelligence’. He swung into frantic and meddlesome action. First he had to regain control of the localities.