In this admirable first book, Thomas McSweeney casts new light on the professional culture of the early English common law. He argues that at the turn of the thirteenth century, the proliferation of Romanist legal learning and the growing professionalization of the king's courts combined to create a generation of English judges and clerks who understood themselves as expert jurists—the titular “priests of the law.” In doing so, he neatly shifts the terms of the long-standing debates over the influence of Roman law in England. Rather than searching for doctrinal similarities and differences, he argues that we should try to understand how contemporary lawmen understood the relationship between the two laws. He presents a compelling case that while they understood common law to have its own distinctive rules and concepts, they found in the ius commune a jurisprudential framework that gave their work a deeper meaning.

His analysis is founded on an extended gloss of the massive, complex treatise known as Bracton, written and revised during the first half of the thirteenth century. For McSweeney, Bracton was the textual expression of this particular professional milieu of clerks and justices employed in the royal courts; neither an educational text nor a reference book, it was written to demonstrate to this community that they were “part of the broader legal culture of Latin Christendom” (6). If this seems a rather quixotic reason to write a treatise of several hundred folia, McSweeney's proposal is made compelling through his exploration of the constellation of texts that orbited Bracton. From the Romanist writings that its authors evidently knew in great detail, to the writs and plea rolls of their working lives, thirteenth-century justices spent their lives swimming in legal texts of one kind or another; Bracton was written to show that all this writing could be brought into harmony within a single intellectual system.

To my mind, this is the most original and far-reaching implication of the book. McSweeney argues that we ought to understand law in this period as a set of “textual practices” thought and enacted through the writing, compiling, abstracting, and editing of texts. Through a meticulous analysis, McSweeney shows us the traces of these processes: the scholastic techniques of glossing and dialectical reasoning, the practice of annotating plea rolls and collecting cases, and subsequently, citing and reconciling the opinions of justices. He makes a strong case for this approach, showing how these practices shaped the legal record, such as when the justice Henry de Bratton (for whom Bracton is misnamed) edited his plea rolls in order to make clear the legal principles that framed his decisions. As McSweeney suggests, such practices demonstrate the extent to which justices were attempting to fashion themselves, and one another, as legal authorities in the style of Roman law.

It was here, though, that the book's tight focus on a small professional milieu and a few texts also felt a little restrictive. With the thirteenth century as a crucial phase within Michael Clanchy's sweeping chronology “from memory to written record” in English government and society, it would have been interesting to reflect on how the complex textualization of legal thinking ramified beyond the king's courts and their personnel. Did it contribute to contemporary perceptions of legal learning as a money-making racket? (Langland would later place Civil Law alongside Simony in the throng of Lady Meed.) Did it help to spur the formalization of the petition as an alternative route to royal justice? And how far did the textual practices developed in the king's courts reverberate through other parts of the legal system?

But if this book raises new avenues for future research, it has a great deal to recommend it as it is. In addition to the clarity of its ideas and the thoroughness of its underlying research, it is written with a simplicity and warmth that will make it an excellent tool for undergraduate (and more advanced) teaching—a very rare quality in this subfield, where there is a high bar to entry for novices. If you need your students to understand what Bracton is, and to empathize with the minds from which it came, then look no further. McSweeney has made a lasting contribution to scholarship on Bracton, the professional ethos of the early common law, and the textual machinery of medieval legal culture.