Folio from 'Henrici de Bractone de legibus et consuetudinibus Anglicanis libri quatuor' or the 'Bracton...

Henry of Bracton, also Henry de Bracton, also Henrici Bracton, or Henry Bratton also Henry Bretton (c. 1210 – c. 1268) was an English cleric and jurist. The treatise known as Bracton, composed in the wake of Magna Carta, is the most ambitious legal work from medieval England. Providing a survey of the application of the common law in the king’s courts, with citations of past cases, it focuses on property rights and criminal law. The treatise was formerly attributed to Henry of Bratton (d. 1268), a justice in south-west England, but Henry was probably merely the reviser of an existing treatise, compiled during the 1220s and 1230s. Henry of Bratton may nonetheless have been responsible for adding the work’s second preface, which talks of men who are ‘foolish and insufficiently instructed, who climb the seat of judgement before learning the laws’. This opening page of a manuscript of Bracton is headed by a miniature of a king holding a sword in one hand and a sealed charter in the other