1166 - The Assize of Clarendon

The Assize of Clarendon was an 1166 act of Henry II of England that began the transformation of English law from such systems for deciding the prevailing party in a case, especially felonies, as trial by ordeal or trial by battle or trial by compurgation to an evidentiary model, in which evidence, inspection, and inquiry was made by laymen, knights or ordinary freemen, under oath. However although the act greatly fostered the methods that would eventually be known in common law countries as trial by jury, some historians commented that its origins begun earlier, probably being at least partly in pre-existing the date of the Assize of 1166. The Assize of Clarendon did not lead to this change immediately, however; recourse to trial by combat was not officially rescinded until 1819, yet fell out of use. The Assize takes its name from Clarendon Palace, Wiltshire, the royal hunting lodge at which it was promulgated.

These proceedings did much to transfer power out of the hands of local barons and into the hands of the royal court and its judges. In 1215, moreover, the Fourth Lateran Council forbade clergymen from participating in trial by ordeal. After this date, trials after indictment by the grand jury were conducted by juries as well.



The large changes wrought in the English system of justice did not go unchallenged. The dispute over jurisdiction over the one-sixth of the population of England who were clergy was the chief grievance between the King and Becket. Disgruntled peers attempted to undo Henry's reforms by the Magna Carta forced on King John, but by that time the reforms had progressed too far—and their superiority over the system they had replaced was too obvious—for the forces of reaction to gain much ground. Henry II's reforms laid the groundwork for the system of trials in common law.

The common law—so named because it was "common" to all the king's courts across England—originated in the practices of the courts of the English kings in the centuries following the Norman Conquest in 1066. The British Empire spread its legal system to its historical colonies, many of which retain the common law system today. These "common law systems" are legal systems that give great precedential weight to common law, and to the style of reasoning inherited from the English legal system.



Today, one-third of the world's population lives in common law jurisdictions or in systems mixed with civil law, including Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belize, Botswana, Burma, Cameroon, Canada (both the federal system and all its provinces except Quebec), Cyprus, Dominica, Fiji, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Kenya, Liberia, Malaysia, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Namibia, Nauru, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom (including its overseas territories such as Gibraltar), the United States (both the federal system and all its states except for Louisiana), and Zimbabwe. Some of these countries have variants on common law systems.