BRITTON, the title of the first great treatise of the law of England in the French tongue, which purports to have been writ ten by command of King Edward I. The author is probably either John le Breton, a justice for the county of Norfolk, or a royal clerk of the same name. The probable date of the book is 1291 92. It was based upon the treatise of Henry de Bracton (q.v.), which it brought up to date. The work is entitled in an early ms. of the 14th century, which was once in the possession of Selden, and is now in the Cambridge university library, Summa de legibus Anglie que vocatur Bretone; and it is described as "a book called Bretoun" in the will of Andrew Horn, the learned chamberlain of the City of London, who bequeathed it to the chamber of the Guildhall in 1329, together with another book called Mirroir des Justices.
Britton was first printed in London by Robert Redman, without a date, probably about the year 1530. Another edition of it was printed in 1640, corrected by E. Wingate. A third edition of it, with an English translation, was published at the University Press, Oxford, 1865, by F. M. Nichol. An English translation of the work without the Latin text had been previously published by R. Kelham in 1762.