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Written for the beginning student as well as the experienced scholar, this introductory analysis of the origin and early development or the English common law provides and excellent grounding for the early study of legal history. Between 1154, when Henry II became king, and 1307, when Edward I died, the common law underwent spectacular growth.
The author begins with a discussion of the relationship between the early rules of common law and the social order they serve during this period and concludes with an extended commentary on the durability and continued growth of the common law in modern times.

"I have attempted to show the relation between early rules of common law and the social order which they served, because I am certain that laws should not be treated as though they float in air, timeless and apart from circumstances. Laws bear directly on the incidents of daily life." Arthur R. Hogue, Preface

Arthur R. Hogue

Arthur Reed Hogue was born on November 16, 1906, in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Hogue graduated Magna cum laude from Oberlin College (Ohio) in 1928 and was admitted to Harvard with a university scholarship in the same year. In 1929, the Harvard faculty of Arts and Sciences awarded him the Toppan Prize in Political Science. While finishing his doctoral work, Hogue began his professional academic career at Radcliff College as a teaching assistant in history in 1930 until 1934, when he received both his Ph.D. in history and a Francis Parkman Fellowship, from which he later resigned to take a position at Hanover College (Indiana) as an assistant professor.

Within one year (1935), Hogue had been promoted to full professor at Hanover, and by 1938 was named Head of the Department of History, and later named Academic Dean in 1944. He served as both department chair and dean for the next four years until 1948, when he was appointed to the faculty at the University of Illinois as an Assistant Professor.

In 1950, Hogue accepted the appointment of Associate Professor of History at Indiana University where he began to work on his primary interests of European History, particularly of the Classical and Medieval periods, while undertaking a lead role in teaching core courses in the History Department. Aside from a host of other university related committee work, including serving on the Faculty Council, he chaired the committee on Medieval Studies, taught many of the historical survey classes on European History, helped to found the American Society for Legal History, and began to formalize his long time interest in Medieval Legal History, particularly the development in English Common Law of the rules governing the relationship between buyer and seller, landlord and tenant, and debtor and creditor—subjects of his 1936 doctoral dissertation, Form and Action in Litigation between Creditors and Debtors in 13th Century England . In 1966, he published Origins of the Common Law(Bloomington: Indiana University Press), which has become a standard text for the basic understanding of the development of American law and its relationship to the English Tradition, still recommended by Law Schools in the United States, and currently in print. Following the publication of Origins, Hogue was promoted to full professor in July of 1966.

Hogue continued to be an active scholar and teacher until his retirement in 1974. In the retirement notices published by the university, Hogue was noted for his generosity and respect towards students and for his lively and informative lecturing style and was promoted to Emeritus without hesitation. Memorializing Hogue’s death on Tuesday, February 18, 1986, the Indiana University Faculty Council Memorial Resolution noted not only his significant contributions to scholarship, but his sense of humor and sophistication, “in the best sense of the word.”