Merton in 1236. It has been suggested that the famous addicionesto
Bractonmay be citations of old cases removed from the original text to
the margin by revisers who found that the development of the law had
made them obsolete, and then restored selectively and variously to the
body of the text by copyists who took them for new material.^45
Bracton, it seems, cannot be the work solely or mainly of the judge
Henry of Bracton who wrote in the 1250s and died in 1268, because the
law it contains is basically of the 1220s and 1230s, supplemented (but
not systematically revised) at later points in different ‘voices’.^46
Similarly, the dating and attribution of the late thirteenth-century work
that goes under the name of Brittonis contested, because the treatise
pieces legislation produced over a period of time into a static picture of
the English legal system. This work claims to fulfil a royal commission
to reduce to writing ‘such laws as have heretofore been used in our
realm’, which are to be ‘observed in all points, saving to us the power
of repealing, extending, restricting and amending them, whenever we
shall see good, by the assent of our earls and barons and others of our
Council; saving also to all persons such customs as by prescription of
time have been differently used, so far as such customs are not contrary
to law’.^47
As in 1275 in his first ‘parliament general’ Edward I legislated to ‘set
to rights the state of his kingdom’ of England, and in 1284 decreed a
new legal order to stand in conquered Wales, so in 1305, after a decade
of trying to subdue the Scots, he ordained super stabilitate terrae
Scotiae. His lieutenant in Scotland was told to call together the people,
‘read over the laws that King David made’ and ‘the amendments and
additions which have been made since by kings’, and ‘reform and
amend the laws and customs which are clearly displeasing to God
and to reason’.^48 The compilation of Regiam Majestatemmay possibly
have stemmed from that order, but it is more likely that the Scottish
law-book (like the Welsh laws earlier) was drawn up in repudiation of
English legal imperialism, in which case it fits a date after Robert
Bruce’s victory at Bannockburn in 1314, and the ‘Royal Majesty’ that
sanctions good laws belongs to the king of Scots. Book I of the work
Law-books, custom, and legislation 199(^45) Glanvill, pp. xxxiv–xxxv; Bracton, tr. Thorne, ii, 19, iii, pp. xxii, xxxi, xxxvi, xliv; iv.
296–7.
(^46) P. Brand, ‘The Age of Bracton’, in The History of English Law: Centenary Essays on
‘Pollock and Maitland’, ed. J. Hudson (Oxford UP for the British Academy, 1996).
(^47) Britton, 2 vols. ed. and tr. F. M. Nichols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1865; repr. Holmes
Beach, Fla., 1983); for the administrative career of John le Breton, overlooked by F. W. Mait-
land in the Dictionary of National Biography, see the Close Rollsof Henry III and the
Calendars of Patent Rolls, and for confirmation of the identity of the sheriff with the bishop,
the Memoranda Rolls at the time of his death: PRO E159/50, m. 10 and E368/36, membranes.
14d, 22, 22d.
(^48) Statutes of the Realm, i. 55.