The title ‘English Justinian’ was accorded Edward I with the undoubted intention of highlighting the enduring significance of his legislative pro- gramme. The epithet was coined, however, not by a contemporary chronicler, but by the early seventeenth-century judge and scholar, Sir Edward Coke, who marvelled at both the substantive content and the sheer volume of entries in the statute book stemming from Edward's reign. When writing in his Institutes of the Laws of England concerning the first Statute of Westminster (1275), Coke considered:

If Coke's comment was to some extent an exaggeration, it probably says as much about Coke and his own agenda as it testifies to the merits of Edward I's legislation. The retrospective reference clearly reflected a desire on Coke's part that the English should have a legislative icon in the same way that the sixth-century Roman Emperor Justinian was hailed for the ‘law code’ that became the foundation of Roman civil law. By naming his own work (intended to be a comprehensive guide to the national laws of England) after Justinian's Institutes, Coke essentially wanted to emphasize the sense of past tradition as well as to identify the architect behind his native law: a motive that was endorsed by the nineteenth-century constitutional historian

Bishop William Stubbs and the great lawyer and historian Sir William Holdsworth.

In suggesting that Edward III should be dubbed ‘second English Justinian', there is tacit acknowledgement of the epithet's validity as applied to Edward I within the framework of English legislative initiatives. My main purpose here, though, is not to justify Edward I's posthumous title, nor dispute his legislative achievements, but to ascertain whether Edward III's enactments can be considered as part of a programme of legislation that laid decisive foundations warranting historical acclaim or whether his laws were essen- tially short-termist in character, being driven primarily by political concerns and his own dynastic ambitions.