"In the thirteenth century, a group of judges working in England's royal courts wrote the celebrated treatise known as Bracton, a treatise that is still regularly cited by courts as one of the great works of the early common law. Although Bracton is much celebrated, its purpose is often misunderstood. [This book] offers a new interpretation of Bracton and the aims of the judges who wrote it. Bracton was not so much an attempt to explain or reform the early common law as it was an attempt to establish the status and authority of the judge. The judges who wrote it-- Martin of Pattishall, William of Raleigh and Henry of Bratton-- were some of the first people to work full-time in England's royal courts, at a time when they had no obvious model for the legal professional. They found one in an unexpected place: they sought to clothe themselves in the authority and prestige of the scholarly Roman-law tradition that was sweeping across Europe in the thirteenth century. They modelled themselves on the jurists of Roman law who were teaching in Italy and France. In Bracton, and other texts they produced, the justices of the royal courts worked hard to establish that the nascent common-law tradition was just one constituent part of the Roman-law tradition. Through their writing, this small group of people, working in the courts of an island realm, imagined themselves to be part of a broader European legal culture. They made the case that they were not merely servants of the king. They were priests of the law."-- Dust jacket.