SIXTEENTH CENTURY CONTRACT LAW: SLADE'S CASE IN CONTEXT

Abstract

For many years Slade's Case has been seen as the watershed of English contract law, the case where the new action of assumpsit finally triumphed over the old-fashioned and limited writ of debt after a period of almost one hundred years when the relationship between the two actions was in doubt. Many other consequences have been attributed to it, but Dr Baker's work has shown that such attributions are misplaced: all that Slade's Case was concerned with was the relationship between the action of debt and the emergent action of assumpsit.' In recent years a number of writers have offered interpretations of the case;2 but only Dr Baker's 1971 study has attempted to ground analysis of the case on the best available evidence, the mass of unprinted law reports and Plea Rolls of the late sixteenth century. Since 1971 a considerable amount of new material has emerged, and a reappraisal of the case itself and the wider issue of the relationship between assumpsit and debt in the second half of the sixteenth century is perhaps now in order.