If two conference papers can constitute evidence of a habit, then I seem to be forming a habit of producing plans for research by other people when there are no longer other people available to carry them out. My excuse this time is that the theme of this conference has long been a favourite of my own. Although historians of the common law have rightly devoted much attention to the workings of the courts – as evidenced by the plea rolls and law reports – they have paid very little attention to the possible influences of teaching on the way lawyers think. Yet it is hardly possible that medieval lawyers could have learned their law from the year books, unless they were better cryptanalysts than we can credibly imagine, while for most of them the plea rolls were even less accessible in Hell than they are at Kew. What they did all have access to was a system, or perhaps more than one system, of largely oral legal education. To the extent that the content of their courses was unwritten, we might write this off as lost evidence and struggle on with the year books. But it is not wholly and irretrievably lost. Difficult though it is to reconstruct any kind of teaching from student notes, which have rarely in any age reflected adequate credit on those whose work they mangle, there remains a large quantity of manuscript evidence to exploit.