In the early twelfth century the legal lieutenants who were responsible for the king's justice in the localities had limited authority. As the passive representatives of an absent king they presided over special sessions of a county court where others – local worthies or suitors following local custom – passed judgment. Henry II transformed their status and power. From 1176 the royal justices in eyre made judgments themselves in what was a local session of a national royal court. They were becoming fully-fledged judges with the beginnings of an independent authority, not the mere mouthpieces of the king. For the first time, judgment-making was not subject to the vagaries of local politics, popularity or influence. The judges were royal appointees with no local roots or allegiances.

The first stirrings of a judicial professionalism were being seen, and royal justices would soon have their own headquarters at Westminster Hall and a law manual in Glanvill. The fact that so many early manuscripts of this vademecum survive suggest that each royal justice may have had one. 2 Much of the common law was to be judge-made. If it originated in royal diktat, it developed as a result of a combination of a sensible, if circumscribed, discretionary power which Henry II had conferred on his justices, with their own sense of the importance of consensus and collective wisdom. Royal justices were becoming a corporate body: the judiciary.