Before the common learning, before the Inns of Court: common opinion in the fourteenth century

This chapter investigates the phenomenon of the ‘common opinion’ referred to in the yearbooks c.1300-1350. It draws out connections between English law reports, the wider European intellectual tradition of the argument from authority, and the ius commune. The available sources make it very difficult to determine quite how the idea of ‘common opinion’ was used and understood. Sometimes references to the ‘common opinion’ had normative consequences, as in the ius commune, rendering the ‘common opinion’ a form of authority in the common law. More commonly, references to ‘common opinion’ appear to be pedagogical. As legal education moved from the court to the Inns of Court, references to the ‘common opinion’ disappeared, with the ‘common learning’ emerging instead