ENGLISH LAW
The system of law that has developed in England
from approximately 1066 to the present.
The body of English law includes legislation,
COMMON LAW, and a host of other legal norms
established by Parliament, the Crown, and the
judiciary. It is the fountain from which flowed
nearly every facet of U.S. law during the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries.
Many of the concepts embodied in the U.S.
Constitution—such as the separation and dele-
gation of powers between three branches of
government and the creation of an elective
national assembly representing the will of the
people—trace their roots to English law. Fun-
damental legal procedures applied in the U.S.
civil and criminal justice systems also origi-
nated in England. The jury system, for exam-
ple, slowly matured into its modern form over
several hundred years of English history. The
antecedents of many substantive areas of U.S.
law, including the ubiquitous system of state
and federal taxation, may be found in English
history as well.
The story of English CONSTITUTIONAL LAW
prior to the American Revolution, which is inex-
tricably intertwined with the development of
English law as a whole during this period, can be
told in three parts: the centralization of power in
the monarchy, the creation of Parliament as a
limitation on the absolute power asserted by the
monarchy, and the struggle for supremacy
between Parliament and the monarchy. In large
part, the American Revolution resulted from
Parliament’s failure to check the monarchy’s
sovereignty and establish itself as the supreme
lawmaking body representing the people of
England and its colonies.
When William, duke of Normandy, also
known as William the Conqueror, vanquished
England in 1066, there was no English law as the
Americans of 1776 came to know it. No national
or federal legal machinery had yet been contem-
plated. Law was a loose collection of decentral-
ized customs, traditions, and rules followed by
the Anglians and Saxons, among others. Crimi-
nal cases were indistinguishable from civil cases,
and both secular and spiritual disputes were
resolved at the local level by community courts.
Trials in the modern sense did not exist, nor did
juries. Guilt and innocence were determined by
compurgation and ordeal.
Compurgation was a ritualistic procedure in
which accused persons might clear themselves
of an alleged wrongdoing by taking a sworn oath
denying the claim made against them, and cor-
roborating the denial by the sworn oaths of 12
other persons, usually neighbors or relatives. If
an accused person failed to provide the requisite
number of compurgators, he or she lost. The
number of compurgators was the same as the
number of jurors later impaneled to hear crimi-
nal cases under the common law. In the United
States, the SIXTH AMENDMENT to the Constitu-
tion required that all criminal trials be prose-
cuted before 12 jurors—until 1970, when the
Supreme Court ruled that six-person juries were
permissible (Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78, 90
S. Ct. 1893, 26 L. Ed. 2d 446).
Trial by ordeal was a superstitious procedure
administered by clerics who subjected accused
persons to physical torment in hopes of uncov-
ering divine signs of guilt or innocence. The
most common forms of ordeal involved boiling
or freezing waters and hot irons. In the ordeal of
freezing water, accused persons were thrown
into a pool to see if they would sink or float. If
they sank, the cleric believed they were innocent,
because the water would presumably reject
someone with an impure soul. Of course, per-
sons who sank to the bottom and drowned dur-
ing this ordeal were both exonerated of their
