Making the Law Common: Travel and Communication in the English King’s Courts

The English Common Law is a creation of the Middle Ages and scholars have debated its origins and character intensely for the last century and more. One aspect is less often examined: how did this law, including its French phrases, arcane concepts, and complex procedure become known and common across the country? The answer is in part the need to travel and attend the court that we can see in practice from the thirteenth century. The law was about motion and many people were required to attend. The development of the itinerant courts (Eyre) from the late twelfth to the early fourteenth century were a key component for dynamising English society and disseminating the law and its concepts and practices through the country’s counties. Travelling not only with judges, but with lawyers and clerks as well, the Eyre courts started to knit the country into one legal whole. This was all the more the case because of the considerable number of people from many walks of life and statuses, men and women, who had to appear. Local juries, all tenants in chief, and many officials were required to attend the court, often travelling significant distances. They would be joined by the many advocates and litigants in both civil and criminal cases who had pending business. This paper will outline the dynamic networks that constituted the common law at work in the Eyre, and will undertake both a social network analysis of the attendants but also a geographic analysis of the patterns and distances of travel required in becoming involved in the court. Actor network analysis also plays its part because the system only worked by moving letters, messengers, and horses to converge and create the network that is a court by which information is cultivated and disseminated.