chapter sevenThe Legal Ordering of ‘the
State of the Realm’
This chapteris concerned with the ways ‘the state of the realm’
came to be structured internally by law, and the remaining chapters of
the book will follow the beginnings of its transformation into the
‘modern state’ of the politicians.
Law-books, custom, and legislation
Aquinas’s linking of ‘the state of the regime’ to the ‘state of the people’
by means of legislation fixes on a central theme of thirteenth-century
politics. The ‘state of the king and the kingdom’ was understood to need
reform as a single entity, and this was why the rules made for ‘the
government of the court and of the realm’ provided first of all for the
composition of the king’s council which framed new statutes, and for
the calling of parliaments which assented to them.^1
But law-making was a working together of the edicts of rulers and the
customs of peoples. The thirteenth century is marked out as the first
century of legal state-building not so much by the proliferation of
statutes as by the production of a remarkable cluster of national law-
books: the treatise ‘on the laws and customs of the realm of England’
once attributed to Justiciar Rannulf Glanvill and composed a decade or
so before 1200; the Norman Très Ancien Coutumier(1200 x 1204) and
Grand Coutumier (1254 x 1258); the Sachsenspiegel (‘Mirror of the
Saxons’) from the 1220s, and the other German ‘mirrors’; the treatise
On the Laws and Customs of Englandgoing under the name of Henry
of Bracton (1230s to 1250s); the Welsh law-books, in both Latin and
the vernacular; the Castilian Fuero Realor Flores de las Leyes(1252 x
1255); for France, the Livre de Jostice et de Plet, the Établissements de
Saint-Louis, and Philippe de Beaumanoir’s Coutumes de Beauvaisis
(c.1280); and into the fourteenth century the Scottish law-book called
Regiam Majestatem.^2 These descriptions of bodies of law were needed
(^1) Cf. above pp. 7, 160, 172.
(^2) A conspectus of the law-books can be found in Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der
neueren europäischen Privatrechtsgeschichte, i, ed. H. Coing (Munich, 1973).