The two towering figures in medieval English legal history are Henry II, the founder of the common law, and Edward I, the ‘English Justinian’. Henry III has, perhaps inevitably, been overshadowed. For instance, Robert Palmer's 2003 survey of English legal history jumps straight from Magna Carta to Edward I, omitting Henry III entirely. This is not to underestimate the importance of a number of recent studies on particular aspects of the legal system during the reign. Equally valuable are the editions of the Curia Regis Rolls down to 1250 and an increasing number of published eyre rolls. There is also a general understanding that important changes took place during Henry's reign. According to F. W. Maitland, Henry's reign was ‘an age of rapid, but steady and permanent growth … the subsequent centuries will be able to do little more than to fill in the details of a scheme which is set before them as unalterable.’ The following discussion aims to use the evidence of the fine rolls to shed new light on this ‘scheme’.

To fully understand the significance of the reign of Henry III for English legal history, it is necessary first to sketch the broad outline of the legal system. Indeed, it could be argued that there was no single ‘legal system’ in medieval England but rather a multiplicity of different jurisdictions: the royal (or common law) courts of the Bench (and, from 1234, coram rege) and the itinerant royal justices, sitting in eyre ad omnia placita or commissioned to hear individual assizes; the communal courts of the hundred, county and borough; the private courts of the manor and honour; and the church courts. The counter-argument would stress the extent to which these different systems were integrated, particularly under Henry II, so that pleas could be transferred from local courts to central courts. This essay will focus on civil litigation over property as conducted in the central courts. As Donald Sutherland pointed out, ‘in the course of the thirteenth century, the business of county and feudal courts in judging claims to freehold declined almost to the vanishing point, and this work passed over to the king's court.’ But can we be more precise about this process?