Legislación y actividad judicial en los concilios de Enrique II de Inglaterra (1154-1189)

Abstract

This article refers to the extraordinary amount of legislation and judicial activity that took place at the councils of Henry II Plantagenet. By means of an analysis of the main sources of the period: the chronicles, the government records and the first legal and judicial treatises that appeared in England from the twelfth century, the following study concludes, also taking the political context and the juridical order into account, that the political culture of the time determined that all legislation of territorial enforcement required some form of assent and that there was no more appropriate accasion to obtain this than a council, just as for the resolution of judicial cases of public nature. This increasing institutionalisation explains the regularity and frequency, without precedents in medieval Europe, that these meetings reached in Henry  II's England.