The guilds of law in medieval legal history an inquiry into the origins of the inns of court

Medieval England presents the student of legal history with a number of interesting peculiarities. Among these are the common law and the schools where it was taught, the Inns of Court. English law was the only native law in medieval Europe, functioning distinctly from both civil and canon law. It was judge-made, and followed the case-law method peculiar to it, distinct from the codification system of civil and canon law. And its schools, called the Inns of Court, were, in Christendom, the only law schools of their kind that came out of the Middle Ages into modern times. These and other features belonged to England alone among all the nations of Europe. It shared them only with the Muslim East. The extant sources contain no direct evidence of a connection between the two systems; but that the similarities between them were peculiar to them alone, there can be no doubt.