common law

common law The origins of the common law lay in the justice of the king, exercised through his curia regis, rather than the customary law exercised in the old communal courts of shire and hundred, or the feudal law exercised by the lord in relation to his own vassals. As overlord of all subjects, the king had a residual right to give justice to all, and as feudal lord of the tenants‐in‐chief he had the right and the duty to sit in his curia regis to hear their disputes. Until the reign of Henry II, royal justice was available to subjects who were not tenants‐in‐chief only in exceptional cases. However, in the reign of Henry II, access to the king's justice was extended by the enactment of a principle that ‘no man need answer for his freehold land without the king's writ being obtained’. As these royal writs became popular with litigants, they increasingly sought the justice of the king's courts rather than the local or feudal courts, which slowly declined.

The king's justice was dispensed by the itinerant justices of the curia regis. When the courts of Common Pleas, King's Bench, and Exchequer developed as separate entities, the law they applied was the common law. By the time of Edward I there was in existence a ‘common law’—the law administered in the king's courts throughout the land and therefore ‘common’ to the whole kingdom.

The term ‘common law’ came to be used of the English legal system and, generally, to describe a system where the law is built up through the decisions of the courts. The term is therefore used to describe rules of law which have been established by the courts as against laws which are formally enacted by Parliament (statute law).