Abstract
From the time of its earliest known copy in the fourteenth century, the Anglo-Norman legal treatise the Mirror of Justices (ca. 1290) has fascinated readers with its blend of fictional and actual law. Deemed a “romance” by F. W. Maitland, the text occupies uncertain territory between the fields of jurisprudence and literature, as it surveys and explains a legal system that it also seeks to critique and change. This article examines the tension between the encyclopedic ambitions of the Mirror and its reformist goals, arguing that many of the text’s most dramatic alterations to England’s legal past - including the invention of the so-called “original constitutions” of King Alfred - emerge from the effort to harmonize the procedures of the common law with an ethics of law-giving derived from biblical injunction. The article goes on to show the Mirror’s affiliation with an array of satirical, polemical, and reform-minded verse and prose from the late thirteenth century.
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