I have touched on the subject of the law and policing in a number of my potted histories, principally in the place histories and the general British histories. The objective here is to build on that information and produce a separate article.
As with all my potted histories, it is aimed at the general reader who might have an interest in the topic, hopefully producing something which is informative, readable and provides some context for events. It does not pretend to be a scholarly work.
It begins with a brief mention of the early civilisations in the Middle East, before covering classical antiquity and eventually concentrating on England.
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Law in one form or another must be almost as old as organised human society. Even communities without writing, governments, courts or professional judges needed rules governing violence, theft, property, marriage and obligations towards other members of the group.
We cannot know precisely how law operated in prehistoric societies, but it probably consisted mainly of customs which everyone was expected to observe. Enforcement would have rested largely with the family or wider community, with disputes settled by agreement, compensation, exclusion from the group or, sometimes, retaliation. The long history of law can therefore be seen partly as a gradual transfer of responsibility from individuals and communities to rulers and ultimately to the state.
Contents
The First Written Laws
Some of the earliest surviving written laws come from Mesopotamia. The Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu, dating from around 2100 BC, contained prescribed punishments and compensation for various offences. Several centuries later, in about 1750 BC, the Babylonian king Hammurabi produced the much more famous Code of Hammurabi. It covered subjects ranging from theft and assault to marriage, property, wages and commercial transactions. Punishments varied according to the social status and sex of those involved and could be extremely severe. Nevertheless, the importance of such codes lies partly in the principle that rules and punishments could be stated in advance rather than being decided entirely at the whim of a ruler or local chief.
Ancient Greece never developed a single legal system comparable with that subsequently created by Rome. Each Greek city-state had its own arrangements. Athens is particularly interesting because ordinary male citizens played a considerable part in administering justice. Its courts could contain very large juries, sometimes numbering hundreds, and litigants normally presented their own cases. Women, slaves and foreigners did not enjoy the political and legal standing of male citizens. The Athenian system was very different from anything later developed in England, although the concept of citizens participating in the administration of justice has obvious echoes in the later English jury.
It was the Romans who created the ancient world’s most sophisticated system of law. The Twelve Tables, traditionally dated to the fifth century BC, were an early attempt to make important legal rules publicly known. During the following centuries Roman jurists developed elaborate principles governing ownership, contracts, inheritance and personal status. Roman law distinguished between different forms of legal action and produced a professional body of legal thought which survived the Roman Empire itself.
A major later development was the codification ordered by the emperor Justinian in the sixth century CE. The resulting body of law, usually known collectively as the Corpus Juris Civilis and including the Code of Justinian, brought together imperial legislation and much earlier Roman legal writing. It did not become the law of England, but its rediscovery and study in medieval Europe had a profound influence upon the legal systems of many continental countries.
Roman law was therefore to exercise an enormous influence upon continental Europe. From the Middle Ages onwards it was studied in the universities and provided much of the foundation of what is usually termed the civil-law tradition. England was to follow a somewhat different path. Although Roman ideas were never entirely absent, English common law developed mainly from England’s own medieval institutions.
Roman Britain
Following the Roman invasion in 43 CE much of Britain became part of the Roman Empire. Roman governors and officials exercised authority over the province, while Roman citizens were governed by Roman law. The Romans did not, however, simply abolish the existing customs of the indigenous population. Local communities continued to follow many of their traditional laws and practices, particularly in everyday private affairs, provided that these did not conflict with Roman authority.
Britain therefore had overlapping legal arrangements rather than a single uniform Roman system imposed upon everyone from the outset. Roman law became increasingly important as towns developed, provincial government expanded and more inhabitants acquired Roman citizenship. In 212 CE citizenship was granted to almost all free inhabitants of the Empire, greatly extending the formal reach of Roman law.
Anglo-Saxon Law
The various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (Heptarchy) which emerged after the end of Roman rule possessed a mixture of customary and royal law. Much depended upon local custom, although kings increasingly issued written law codes. Æthelberht, king of Kent in the early seventh century, produced the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon law code. Later kings, including Alfred the Great, Æthelred and Cnut, also issued laws.
Anglo-Saxon justice was quite different from modern criminal justice. Many wrongs which would now be regarded as crimes were treated largely as disputes between families. A killing might provoke a blood feud between the relatives of victim and killer. One purpose of the law was therefore to substitute compensation for vengeance.
The best-known example was the wergild, literally the ‘man price’. A monetary value was placed upon a person’s life, with the amount depending upon social position. Compensation was also prescribed for different injuries. Losing an eye, hand or finger, for example, might have a specified value. The system may appear crude, but its object was partly to prevent an injury or killing from producing an endless cycle of revenge.
Women were certainly subject to Anglo-Saxon law and could, in some circumstances, own and inherit property. Their rights varied according to period, status and local custom and should not be confused with modern equality, but the position of women was not necessarily one of complete legal dependence upon husbands. Marriage itself involved property arrangements and compensation, and laws dealt with such matters as abduction, sexual offences and widowhood.
The king gradually acquired a greater interest in preserving order. Certain offences were treated as breaches of the King’s peace and fines became payable to the Crown as well as compensation to the victim or family. This was an important development because crime was slowly becoming an offence against public authority rather than simply a private wrong.
Justice was mainly administered locally. England was divided into shires and the shires into smaller districts generally known as hundreds. Shire courts and hundred courts met periodically and were attended by local landholders. They dealt with disputes and accusations, but there were no professional judges in the modern sense.
Nor was there a police force. Responsibility for maintaining order rested largely upon the community itself. Groups of households were organised into units commonly known as tithings, whose members had a collective responsibility for good behaviour. If a crime was discovered, the ‘hue and cry’ might be raised, requiring people in the locality to pursue the suspected offender.
Determining guilt was also very different from the modern process. An accused person might clear himself by oath, supported by others prepared to swear to his honesty. In other circumstances trial by ordeal could be used. The accused might carry hot iron or plunge a hand into boiling water; the subsequent condition of the wound was taken as an indication of God’s judgement.
There was thus nothing resembling a modern police investigation followed by a trial in which lawyers presented evidence to an independent judge and jury. Nevertheless, Anglo-Saxon England had already developed important foundations upon which later English law was built: local courts, royal legislation, public responsibility for maintaining order and the growing concept of the King’s peace.
The Normans and the King’s Justice
The Norman Conquest of 1066 did not sweep away Anglo-Saxon law. William the Conqueror claimed to be the lawful successor of Edward the Confessor and generally allowed existing customs and local courts to continue. But Norman rule greatly strengthened royal government.
Alongside the existing hundred and shire courts appeared feudal and manorial courts dealing with the affairs of particular estates. The Church also possessed its own courts, dealing not only with religious matters but with subjects including marriage and wills.
Above these various courts stood the King and his council, the Curia Regis. Kings increasingly claimed responsibility for serious offences and disputes affecting royal interests. The sheriff, already an important Anglo-Saxon official, became a major representative of royal government within each county. He collected revenue, convened courts, executed royal writs and helped to maintain order.
The decisive changes came during the reign of Henry II (1154-1189). Henry sought to strengthen royal justice and make it more uniform throughout England. Royal judges increasingly travelled around the country hearing cases. The Assize of Clarendon of 1166 established procedures under which local men reported suspected criminals to royal officials. Judges travelling on circuits increasingly used the same rules in different parts of the country. Local customs gradually gave way to laws applied more generally and thus ‘common’ to the realm. The circuit and assize system which developed from these arrangements survived, remarkably, until 1971.
Henry II’s reign therefore represents one of the great turning points in English legal history. England was moving away from numerous local systems towards a national system of royal justice.
The system of royal writs was also important. Someone wishing to bring certain cases before the King’s courts obtained a writ instructing the appropriate official to take action. Different writs developed for different kinds of dispute and over time became the basis of particular legal remedies.
At the same time the jury began to emerge, although not initially as the impartial body which hears evidence today. Early jurors were local men chosen partly because they were expected to know something about the matter. Gradually the jury changed from a group supplying information into one deciding between evidence presented by others.
Trial by ordeal largely disappeared following the Church’s withdrawal of support for the practice in 1215, and jury trial increasingly took its place.
Magna Carta and Medieval Law
The year 1215 is better remembered for another reason. King John’s military failures, financial demands and arbitrary government provoked rebellion among leading barons. At Runnymede in June, they compelled him to accept the document which became known as Magna Carta, or the Great Charter.
Magna Carta is sometimes presented as though it created democracy and modern civil liberties at a stroke. It did nothing of the sort. Much of it concerned particular grievances of the barons and the workings of feudal society, and the settlement of 1215 quickly collapsed. Nevertheless, it put into writing the important principle that the king and his government were not above the law.
The Charter was subsequently reissued, and later generations attached increasing importance to provisions concerning lawful judgement and the administration of justice. Magna Carta consequently acquired a constitutional importance far beyond the immediate intentions of those who produced it.
The machinery of justice continued to develop during the later Middle Ages. Separate central royal courts emerged, including King’s Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer. King’s Bench dealt particularly with matters concerning the Crown and serious criminal business; Common Pleas concentrated upon disputes between private individuals; and Exchequer principally handled financial matters.
Professional lawyers increasingly appeared. By the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a recognisable legal profession was emerging, and the Inns of Court in London became centres for legal education and professional life.
Another development of significant importance was the rise of the justice of the peace. Local landowners were appointed to help keep the King’s peace, and during the fourteenth century their judicial responsibilities expanded. Justices of the peace, normally unpaid members of the local gentry, came to exercise both judicial and administrative authority. For centuries they were among the most important representatives of government in the English counties.
The medieval period also produced coroners, responsible for investigating certain deaths, while sheriffs retained important duties in law enforcement and court administration.
Women remained subject to a complex mixture of common law, local custom and ecclesiastical law. An unmarried woman or widow could possess property and enter transactions in her own name, but marriage increasingly placed a woman under substantial legal disabilities. This eventually developed into the doctrine generally known as coverture, under which the legal personality of a married woman was, for many purposes, absorbed into that of her husband.
This did not mean that medieval women had no legal rights whatever. Widows, for example, could possess property and pursue claims in the courts, while equity later provided devices which could protect some property for a married woman’s separate use. Nevertheless, the law increasingly distinguished sharply between the legal independence of men and women.
Common Law and Equity
The common law was highly successful but also became increasingly rigid. A person could normally obtain a remedy from a common-law court only if the case fitted within a recognised form of action. Someone suffering an obvious injustice might therefore find that the common law supplied no suitable remedy.
People consequently petitioned the King asking him to intervene. Such petitions were increasingly passed to the Lord Chancellor, and by the fifteenth century the Chancellor’s jurisdiction had developed into the Court of Chancery.
Chancery administered what became known as equity. Rather than being restricted by the technical rules of common law, the Chancellor sought to provide appropriate remedies according to conscience and fairness. Equity eventually developed its own principles and remedies. These included injunctions, ordering a person to do or refrain from doing something, and the development of the trust.
England consequently acquired two overlapping bodies of law: common law and equity. When the two conflicted, equity eventually prevailed. The distinction remains part of English law today even though common law and equity are no longer administered by completely separate court systems.
Tudor and Stuart Law
During the Tudor period royal government became stronger and Parliament increasingly important as a source of legislation. Statutes had existed for centuries, but the growth of the central state meant that Parliament increasingly legislated upon subjects which had previously depended mainly upon common law or local administration.
The Tudors also used prerogative courts associated closely with royal authority. The best known was the Court of Star Chamber. It could deal effectively with powerful offenders whom ordinary courts found difficult to control, but its procedures and association with royal power eventually made it a symbol of arbitrary government, and Parliament abolished it in 1641.
The sixteenth century also saw the development of houses of correction. Whereas traditional gaols were primarily places in which debtors, accused persons and convicted offenders were held, houses of correction were intended to discipline able-bodied vagrants and others regarded as idle or disorderly, often through compulsory work. Imprisonment was not yet the standard punishment for serious crime that it later became.
The seventeenth-century struggle between Crown and Parliament raised fundamental questions about the relationship between law and government. Could the King raise money without Parliament? Could subjects be imprisoned without a stated legal reason? Could royal prerogative override ordinary law?
The judges themselves were not yet independent of government in the modern sense. Kings appointed them and could dismiss them. Nevertheless, lawyers such as Sir Edward Coke argued strongly that rulers were subject to law.
The political and constitutional conflicts of the century produced the English Civil War, the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Commonwealth, the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and finally the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Three significant acts were passed at the end of the century: the Habeas Corpus Act 1679 strengthened procedures by which courts could examine whether a person was being lawfully detained; the Bill of Rights 1689 placed important restrictions upon the Crown and reinforced the authority of Parliament; and The Act of Settlement 1701 helped establish greater security of tenure for senior judges.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, therefore, England had developed a constitutional system in which government itself was increasingly understood to be subject to law.
Maintaining Law and Order Before the Police
Although England possessed courts and judges, it still had nothing resembling a modern professional police service.
For centuries law enforcement remained remarkably decentralised. The parish constable was one of the main local officials. Constables were generally ordinary householders performing the duty temporarily and without professional training. They might arrest offenders, bring suspects before justices of the peace and assist in maintaining public order.
Towns might also employ watchmen, particularly at night. Standards varied enormously and the watch was frequently criticised as ineffective.
Victims themselves played a much greater role than they do today. Someone who had been robbed might have to identify and pursue the offender, find witnesses and initiate a prosecution. Prosecution was generally a private rather than a state function.
Rewards were sometimes offered for the capture and conviction of criminals. This encouraged the development of professional ‘thief-takers’, some of whom operated honestly while others developed questionable relationships with the criminals they supposedly pursued.
The growth of London made these arrangements increasingly inadequate. In 1749 the novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding established a small group of paid officers attached to his magistrates’ office in Bow Street. They became known as the Bow Street Runners. His half-brother John Fielding subsequently developed the organisation further and circulated information about wanted criminals.
The Bow Street Runners were not yet a police force in the modern sense, but they represented an important move towards professional detection.
Crime, Punishment and the Bloody Code
Eighteenth-century criminal law acquired a fearsome reputation for severity. During the so-called Bloody Code, an increasing number of offences were punishable by death. Murder, rape and robbery were capital offences, but the death penalty could also apply to numerous offences against property.
In practice the system was less bloodthirsty than the statute book suggested. Juries sometimes convicted defendants of lesser offences to avoid a death sentence, judges recommended mercy and sentences were frequently commuted.
Transportation became an important alternative. Offenders were initially transported, principally to the American colonies. After American independence, Australia became the major destination, beginning in 1788.
Public executions nevertheless remained a familiar feature of English life. Other punishments included whipping and the pillory.
Prisons existed, but imprisonment itself was still not normally the principal punishment for serious offences. Gaols contained a mixture of people awaiting trial, convicted prisoners, debtors and others. Conditions varied widely, prisoners might have to pay fees to gaolers and disease was common. Men, women and sometimes children could be held in the same institutions, although degrees of separation varied.
The prison reformer John Howard drew attention to these conditions after visiting gaols throughout Britain and Europe. His evidence helped bring legislation in 1774 intended to improve gaols, while the Penitentiary Act 1779 envisaged institutions combining confinement, labour and religious instruction. The particular prisons proposed by the Act were not built, but the idea that imprisonment should itself punish and reform the offender had taken hold.
Prison was thus beginning to change from somewhere in which a person waited for punishment into the punishment itself.
The Coming of the Police
The nineteenth century transformed both law enforcement and the wider legal system.
London expanded rapidly during the Industrial Revolution and many people became convinced that the old combination of parish constables, watchmen and private action could no longer cope. There was nevertheless considerable opposition to establishing a professional police force. Many English people associated such forces with continental despotism and feared that government police would interfere with individual liberty.
The decisive change came with the Metropolitan Police Act 1829, introduced while Sir Robert Peel was Home Secretary. It created a permanent police force for most of London. Other areas gradually followed, and the County and Borough Police Act 1856 effectively made professional policing compulsory throughout England and Wales.
The new police were uniformed, salaried and permanently organised. Their popular names, ‘Bobbies’ and ‘Peelers’, derived from Peel. Unlike soldiers, ordinary constables were not routinely armed with firearms.
Their purpose was not simply to catch criminals. Regular patrol was intended to prevent crime and disorder by the visible presence of the police. This marked a fundamental change. Maintaining everyday order had become the responsibility of a permanent professional organisation rather than an occasional duty imposed upon members of the community.
Detective work developed somewhat later. The Metropolitan Police established a detective branch in 1842, while subsequent advances such as photography, fingerprinting and forensic science gradually transformed criminal investigation.
Prisons and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century
The growth of professional policing coincided with an equally important change in punishment.
The Bloody Code was gradually dismantled and the number of capital offences drastically reduced. Transportation declined during the nineteenth century as penal servitude increasingly replaced it. Transportation as a sentence was effectively ended in 1857, although some prisoners already sentenced continued to be sent overseas and the last transport carrying British convicts arrived in Western Australia in 1868.
At the same time imprisonment became the principal punishment for a much wider range of serious offences.
Early nineteenth-century prison regimes experimented with different ideas. Some reformers believed that isolation would give prisoners an opportunity to reflect upon their wrongdoing. Others favoured communal labour conducted under strict discipline. New prisons were deliberately designed around these theories.
Conditions could be extremely harsh. Silence, hard labour, restricted diets and separation were intended to deter as well as reform. Women were imprisoned under the same broad penal system as men, although usually in separate areas or institutions. Female reformers were particularly influential in drawing attention to the circumstances of women prisoners; Elizabeth Fry became the best known through her work among women at Newgate.
Government supervision steadily increased. The Gaols Act 1823 attempted to introduce greater uniformity, and further legislation expanded Home Office inspection. Finally, the Prisons Act 1877 brought local prisons under central government control through the Prison Commission. What had once been a miscellaneous collection of local gaols was becoming a national prison system.
By the end of the century ideas were again beginning to change. Punishment remained central, but increasing attention was paid to classification, rehabilitation and the different treatment of younger offenders. During the twentieth century hard labour and penal servitude disappeared and the modern prison system gradually evolved.
Prisons nevertheless continue to embody a tension which has never been completely resolved: whether their principal purposes are punishment, deterrence, protection of the public or rehabilitation.
Nineteenth-Century Legal Reform
The nineteenth century also transformed the courts.
Civil litigation in the central courts could be slow and expensive. The County Courts Act 1846 created a network of county courts dealing principally with smaller civil claims and made civil justice more accessible.
The organisation of the superior courts remained confusing, with separate common-law courts and Chancery administering equity. Charles Dickens famously satirised the delays of Chancery in Bleak House.
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The Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875 reorganised the higher courts. The common-law courts and Chancery were brought into a new structure centred upon the High Court and Court of Appeal. Common law and equity could thereafter be administered within the same court system, although their separate principles survived.
Another important development was the growth of public prosecution. For centuries prosecutions had largely been brought privately by victims. The office of Director of Public Prosecutions was created in 1879, although the modern Crown Prosecution Service was not established until 1986.
Women and the Law
The nineteenth century also brought fundamental changes in the legal position of women.
Under the traditional doctrine of coverture, a married woman had very limited independent control of property. In broad terms, marriage placed much of her property and earnings under her husband’s control. An unmarried woman or widow was in a much more independent legal position.
The inequities of this arrangement attracted increasing criticism. The Married Women’s Property Act 1870 allowed a married woman to retain certain earnings and property, while the Married Women’s Property Act 1882 went much further by allowing married women to own and control property independently. Parliament describes the latter change as giving married women control over their own property rather than automatically surrendering it to their husbands.
Marriage and family law were also changing. Until the nineteenth century obtaining a full divorce was exceptionally difficult and, in practice, available largely to wealthy men through a cumbersome process involving Parliament. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 transferred divorce proceedings to a civil court, although the grounds available to husbands and wives were initially unequal. Legislation also gradually improved a mother’s ability to obtain custody of children and legal protection from a violent husband.
These reforms did not suddenly establish equality between men and women. They represented a gradual dismantling of legal rules which had treated married women as dependent upon their husbands.
By 1900 the law governing property and marriage had therefore changed substantially, but women remained excluded from many important parts of legal and public life.
Law in the Twentieth Century
The twentieth century saw less dramatic alteration to the ancient foundations of common law but an enormous expansion in the subjects with which law and government were concerned.
Earlier law had concentrated heavily upon crime, property, contract and relations between individuals. The development of the modern state increasingly brought legislation into employment, education, public health, housing, planning, welfare, consumer affairs and many other aspects of everyday life.
Parliament consequently became a far greater producer of law. Much modern English law is statutory rather than derived directly from decisions of judges, although judges remain responsible for interpreting legislation and common law continues to develop where Parliament has not laid down comprehensive rules.
Access to law also became an important social question. Legal representation had traditionally depended heavily upon the ability to pay. The Legal Aid and Advice Act 1949 established a much more extensive system under which people of limited means could obtain legal assistance, although the scope and financial arrangements of legal aid have changed considerably since then.
The court system underwent another major reorganisation. Until 1971 serious criminal cases outside London were still heard at assizes by judges travelling on the ancient circuits, while other business was dealt with at quarter sessions. The Courts Act 1971 abolished assizes and quarter sessions and created the modern unified Crown Court. The circuits themselves survived.
Capital punishment also disappeared. The death penalty for murder was suspended in Great Britain in 1965 and the abolition was subsequently made permanent.
Women Enter the Legal System
One particularly striking twentieth-century change was that women ceased merely to be subjects of the legal system and were gradually admitted to its institutions.
The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 removed sex as a bar to a number of professions and public functions. Its effects included opening the legal profession to women and allowing women to serve as jurors.
Women subsequently became solicitors, barristers, magistrates and judges. The process was gradual and senior ranks of the profession remained overwhelmingly male for many decades, but the legal prohibition had gone.
Family Law
Family law also continued to change. Divorce became progressively easier and the legal distinction between husband and wife diminished. Changes to matrimonial property, maintenance and the custody of children increasingly treated women as persons with independent legal rights.
More broadly, twentieth-century legislation increasingly prohibited discrimination. The Sex Discrimination Act 1975 was an important landmark, while later legislation relating to sex, race, disability, age and other characteristics was eventually consolidated substantially in the Equality Act 2010.
Thus, one of the great changes in the history of English law has been the gradual movement from a system in which legal rights depended heavily upon sex and marital status towards the formal principle of equality before the law.
Police Powers and Individual Rights
The enormous difference between an Anglo-Saxon tithing and a twentieth-century police force demonstrates one of the central developments in the history of English law. The state had gradually acquired powers which had once belonged to individuals and local communities.
But the greater the powers of the police, the greater became the question of how those powers should be controlled.
For much of their history police powers had developed through an awkward mixture of common law, individual statutes and police practice. Controversies during the 1970s and early 1980s led to a major attempt to put police powers and safeguards upon a clearer statutory basis.
The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, normally known as PACE, became the cornerstone of modern police procedure in England and Wales. Together with codes of practice, it governs important matters including stop and search, arrest, detention, questioning, identification and searches of premises.
Its underlying problem is an ancient one expressed in modern terms: how to give public authorities sufficient power to investigate crime while protecting individuals against arbitrary treatment.
European Influences
For most of its history English common law developed separately from the Roman-law systems prevalent in continental Europe. During the later twentieth century, however, European law once again became an important influence.
The United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community in 1973. European Community and later European Union law consequently affected a wide range of subjects including employment, consumer protection, competition, environmental regulation and commerce.
The United Kingdom left the European Union on 31 January 2020 and the post-Brexit transition period ended on 31 December 2020. To prevent large gaps suddenly appearing in domestic law, much existing EU-derived law was initially preserved as ‘retained EU law’. From 1 January 2024 much of that body of law became known as assimilated law. It remains part of domestic law unless altered or repealed, although the special EU principles which previously governed its interpretation were removed. The Government’s final assimilated-law reporting exercise was completed in 2026.
Separate from the European Union is the European Convention on Human Rights. The United Kingdom was one of the Convention’s original signatories. The Human Rights Act 1998 enabled Convention rights to be relied upon much more directly in British courts.
The European Convention and its European Court of Human Rights are institutions of the Council of Europe, not the European Union. Brexit therefore did not remove the United Kingdom from the Convention.
The Supreme Court
For centuries England had no separate institution called the Supreme Court in the present sense. The highest domestic appeals eventually came to be heard by judges sitting as part of the House of Lords.
This produced the unusual situation in which the country’s highest appeal court was formally located within one of the two Houses of Parliament. The judges concerned, the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary or ‘Law Lords’, were members of the House of Lords, although convention increasingly separated their judicial and political functions.
The Constitutional Reform Act 2005 changed this arrangement. On 1 October 2009 the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom opened in the former Middlesex Guildhall in Parliament Square and took over the judicial functions previously performed by the House of Lords. Its establishment made the institutional separation between the legislature and the country’s highest court much clearer.
The terminology can be confusing because the United Kingdom does not possess a single legal system. England and Wales form one legal jurisdiction, Scotland another and Northern Ireland a third. The Supreme Court is the final court of appeal for civil cases throughout the United Kingdom and for criminal cases from England, Wales and Northern Ireland; Scottish criminal cases normally follow separate arrangements.
English Law Today
It is therefore more accurate today to speak of the law of England and Wales rather than simply English law. England and Wales share the same courts and legal jurisdiction, although devolution has resulted in a growing body of legislation applying specifically to Wales.
Modern law has several principal sources:
- Acts of Parliament are of central importance, together with the large quantity of delegated legislation made under powers granted by Parliament.
- Common law continues to be created and developed through decisions of judges. Under the doctrine of precedent, decisions of higher courts normally bind lower courts dealing with the same legal issue. This gives the law continuity while allowing it to develop as new circumstances arise.
- Equity also survives. Nobody now has to choose between a common-law court and the old Court of Chancery, but equitable concepts such as trusts and remedies such as injunctions remain fundamental.
There is consequently no single document which can be opened to reveal the whole law of England and Wales. It is spread among legislation, judicial decisions and long-established legal principles.
The courts themselves form a hierarchy. Almost all criminal proceedings begin in a magistrates’ court. More serious cases are sent to the Crown Court, where contested trials normally take place before a judge and jury. Civil litigation generally begins in the County Court or, for more substantial or specialised cases, the High Court. Appeals can reach the Court of Appeal and ultimately, in suitable cases involving important points of law, the Supreme Court.
Alongside the ordinary courts are tribunals dealing with specialised subjects such as employment, immigration and taxation.
The prison system is now a national service holding both sentenced prisoners and people awaiting trial or sentence. At the end of March 2026 there were just over 87,000 people in prisons in England and Wales. The problems confronting prisons—including overcrowding, security, rehabilitation, reoffending and the treatment of mentally ill and vulnerable prisoners—show that questions debated by prison reformers more than two centuries ago have by no means disappeared.
The police service is equally far removed from its eighteenth-century predecessors. England and Wales are divided into territorial police force areas, supplemented by specialist forces and national organisations. Police possess substantial statutory powers, but those powers operate within detailed legal controls and systems of oversight.
Yet many traces of the old system remain. Coroners continue to investigate certain deaths. Justices of the peace still sit as lay magistrates. Judges travel on circuits ultimately descended from the medieval system of itinerant royal justice. Juries remain an important feature of serious criminal trials.
Even the symbolism recalls the past. The Royal Arms displayed in most courtrooms signify that justice is administered under the authority of the Crown.
From Custom to the Rule of Law
Looking across several thousand years, the most striking feature is not that one legal system has repeatedly been swept away and replaced by another, but that new layers have continually been added to old ones.
The prehistoric community relied upon custom and collective enforcement. Early kingdoms began to write laws down. Anglo-Saxon England sought to replace private vengeance with compensation and the King’s peace. Medieval kings created royal courts whose judges fashioned a common law applying across England. Equity arose when the common law proved too rigid. Parliament became increasingly important as a law-maker. Professional police gradually took over responsibilities once imposed upon neighbours, watchmen and parish constables. Prisons changed from places of detention into one of the state’s principal forms of punishment.
The people protected by the law changed as well. Legal rights were once profoundly affected by rank, wealth, sex and marital status. Married women in particular spent centuries with a legal status very different from that of men. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries progressively dismantled these distinctions and eventually opened the courts, juries and legal profession themselves to women.
Running through these developments has been another gradual change: the idea that those who govern are themselves subject to law.
This principle did not begin suddenly with Magna Carta, nor did modern liberty emerge fully formed in 1215. Nevertheless, Magna Carta became an enduring symbol of the proposition that rulers cannot simply do whatever they wish. The constitutional conflicts of the seventeenth century, the growing independence of the judiciary, habeas corpus, parliamentary government and modern human-rights law all developed that proposition in different ways.
The history of policing illustrates the other side of the same story. Anglo-Saxon communities were expected to pursue offenders themselves. Medieval sheriffs and constables represented royal and local authority but there was no professional police force. Eighteenth-century London relied upon watchmen, constables, magistrates and privately initiated prosecutions. The nineteenth century created permanent professional police forces. The twentieth century then increasingly defined and restricted their powers through legislation.
English law has therefore not been designed according to a single plan. Unlike a legal code deliberately created at one moment, it is the accumulated result of more than a thousand years of statutes, judicial decisions, institutions, customs and reforms. Some of its apparent peculiarities are simply the remains of earlier stages in that development.
That mixture of continuity and change is perhaps its most distinctive characteristic. The England of Alfred the Great, Henry II or Henry VIII would be almost unrecognisable to a modern lawyer. Yet today’s system still contains descendants of institutions created in each of their periods.
English law began as custom administered largely by local communities. It developed into the King’s law, then the common law of the realm and finally into a modern system in which Parliament makes much of the law, independent courts interpret and develop it and professional organisations enforce it. Behind all these changes lies a principle which took many centuries to establish and remains fundamental today: government as well as the governed is subject to the law.
Notes
This is the first occasion that I have used ChatGPT (version 5.6) to produce a complete article. The process was roughly as follows:
- I described the scope of the article (I had previously touched on the subject in a range of articles and therefore had a solid grasp of the basic content)
- ChatGPT produced an initial draft of around 5k words (length specified by me)
- Various typos and one fundamental problem with the structure were corrected after I had identified them
- I identified various omissions: no mention of women or the development of the prison system being the major items. They were corrected
- Several instances where clarifications of facts were necessary. Once again, they were corrected after I had identified them
- Finally, I made some minor manual changes (style-related) to the final ChatGPT version which was just over 6k words in length.
The end product does not quite have my “voice” but otherwise I am reasonably content with it.
Acknowledgements
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Version History
Version 1.0 – August 6th, 2026