BRAC'TON, or BRATTON, HENRY DE ( ?— 12GS). .111 English ecclesiastic, distinguished as a judge and as the author of the first comprehensive treatise on English law. lle was born at Bretton-Clovelly. in Devonshire, and studied at Oxford, where he took the degree of doctor of laws. and where he is supposed to have lectured on the canon law. Ile became an itinerant judge in 1245, and shortly thereafter a judge of the King's Court. His ecclesiastical and judicial preferment went hand in hand. In 1263 he was Archdeacon of Barnstable and Chancellor of Exeter Cathedral. and in 1265 he is said to have become chief justiciary of Eng land under Henry III. Of his history subse quently to 1267 we know nothing. Ms fame rests on his great work on the laws of England. Dc Legibus et Consuetudinibus Anglia% which has been characterized as "the crown and dower of English medieval jurisprudence" (Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 2d ed.. Cam bridge, Eng., and Boston, 1899). 'It is a system atic treatise on a large and comprehensive plan, not wholly completed, drawing its form from the Roman Ian% but deriving its substance almost en tirely from the precedents of the English law courts. The charge that the book is an indiscrim inate inixthre of Homan and English law, that it represents an attempt to refine and improve the common law by introducing the conceptions of the civil law, has been disproved by recent investi gations of the plea rolls and other authorities upon which he relied. The work was an imme
diate success. Some fifty manuscripts of it have come down to us, and in that age of legal activity it beenme the model of numerous other treatises, some of which, like Fleta and Britton, have also survived. But Bracton had no successor until, 500 years after his death, Blackstone gave his Commentaries to the world. The earliest edi tion of Praeton's De Legibus is the folio edi tion of 1569; the best edition is the one edited by Sir Trovers Twiss, and issued in 1878-83, with an English translation, under the authority of the lords commissioners of the treasury, and under the direction of the master of the rolls.
Certain British Museum manuscripts containing the record of some 2000 eases were discovered about 1884 by Prof. Paul Vinogradoff to have been compiled by Bracton as a 'Note Book,' and were edited by F. W. Maitland for publica tion. Consult: Braeton's Note Book, edited by Maitland (London, 1887) ; Select Passages from Bracton and An, edited for the Selden Society by Maitland (London, 1895) ; Pollock and Mait land. history of English Lew (2d ed., Cambridge, Eng.. and Boston, 1889) • Serutton, Influence of the Homan Law on the Law of England (Cam bridge, Eng., 1885).