No account of the history of English legal literature can omit the name of Littleton. Sir Thomas Littleton's treatise on tenures made the family name almost synonymous with the common law itself. But it is not generally known that another member of that illustrious family left unfinished a work which, had it been completed and published, would have earned him a position of importance in the history, not only of English, but of universal jurisprudence. In so far as the will ought to be taken for the deed, perhaps some measure of recognition may justifiably be afforded to his work even after three centuries of oblivion. The author was Edward Littleton (1589–1645), Baron Lyttelton of Munslow, a direct descendant of Sir Thomas. Educated at Christ Church College, Oxford, he entered the Inner Temple in 1609; and there, like his near-contemporary John Selden (1584–1654), he developed a taste for comparative jurisprudence, legal history and the study of records. His reputation for learning brought him in 1640 to the seat of chief justice of the Common Pleas, and within a year he was made lord keeper of the great seal. The transition to high office was a personal disaster, since Littleton's nature did not suit him for a position of political delicacy in such troubled times, and his brief tenure of the seal was scarcely less miserable than that of his predecessor Finch – who had fled to Holland in 1640.