GLANVILL, RANULF
English COMMON LAW developed partly in response to the pioneering work of Ranulf
Glanvill. As chief justiciar, Glanvill was the legal and financial minister of England under HENRY II. He is commonly associated with the first
important treatise on practice and procedure in
the king’s courts: Tractatus de legibus et consuetu-
dinibus regni Angliae (Treatise on the laws and
customs of the realm of England). Historians
agree that Glanvill is probably not the author of
the Tractatus, which first appeared circa 1188,
but he is thought to have been instrumental in its
creation. Early U.S. law owes much to ENGLISH
LAW, which became greatly simplified and avail-
able to common people during Glanvill’s tenure.
Glanvill was probably born at Stratford St.
Andrew, near Saxmundham, Suffolk, England.
Although few details are known about his life, it is
recorded that he had bumpy political fortunes.
He was sheriff of Yorkshire from 1163 to 1170,
but lost his authority following an official inquiry
into the corruption of sheriffs. He regained it by
helping raise troops against Scottish invaders in
1173–74, and his reward from King Henry II was
a series of increasingly important appointments:
justice of the king’s court, itinerant justice in the
northern circuit, and ambassador to the court in
Flanders. In 1180, Glanvill’s ascent to power
seemed complete when he became legal and
financial minister, but a new king, Richard I,
threw him in prison. He ransomed his way out,
and then died of illness on a Crusade at Acre, in
what is now Israel, in 1190.
For a few centuries before Glanvill became
influential, English law was mired in FEUDAL-
ISM. Under this political and military system,
justice was administered in crude forms: trial by
combat, which operated under the assumption
that God would favor the righteous party, and
trial by ordeal, which, in one of its forms, posed
the question of innocence as a test of whether a
person’s wounds could heal within three days.
By the twelfth century, feudalistic law was dying.
The local courts still adhered to its methods, but
the king’s courts offered a superior form of jus-
tice that was at once less bloody and less super-
stitious. This was a writ-based, or formulary,
system. It allowed litigants to frame a complaint
in terms of a particular action, which had its
own writ and established modes of PLEADING
and trial. Although primitive by modern stan-
dards, the formulary system represented a con-
siderable advance for its time. But such justice
was chiefly available to great lords; commoners
had to resort to the local courts.
As chief justiciar, Glanvill sought to extend
the benefits of the king’s courts to ordinary peo-
ple. He accomplished this through a system of
itinerant royal justices, and the results revolu-
tionized English legal procedure. As the feudal
forms fell into disuse, they were replaced with a
dominant system of central courts that followed
uniform procedure throughout the realm and
made English law simpler and better.
The Tractatus played a crucial role in this
improvement. In fourteen books, it covered each
of the eighty distinct writs used in the king’s
courts. One important writ, for example, was
the grand assize, a procedure for settling land
