England in the eighteenth century witnessed the composition of a single great classic of law which overshadowed all other contemporary legal writing, Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. “It has been said,” one of Blackstone's nineteenth-century editors reported, “that this work … is the most valuable which has ever been furnished to the public by the labour of any individual.” According to Maitland, within a period of five hundred years only two lawyers proved capable of producing a full synthetic statement of the law in England: Bracton and Sir William Blackstone. So overwhelming was the achievement of the Commentaries that the literary creation nearly consumed the identity of its author. Thus Blackstone received notice in numerous law tracts and at Westminster Hall simply as “the learned Commentator on the Laws of England.”

The remarkable success of the Commentaries is quickly revealed in its record of publication. The work was based on a course of lectures which Blackstone began delivering at Oxford in 1753. This was the first occasion on which English law was taught at an English university, and Blackstone designed a set of lectures that would provide “a general map of the law.” Between 1765 and 1769 this map was published as the four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England. Eight editions quickly followed before Blackstone's death in 1780. Between 1783 and 1849 the Commentaries, by then acknowledged “an essential part of every Gentleman's library,” went through another fifteen editions.