BRACTON, Henry de, a learned ecclesiastic, who was chief justiciary in the reign of Henry III. He is supposed to have been born at Bretton-Clovelly in Devonshire. He studied at Oxford, where he took the degree of doctor of laws, and is believed to have delivered lectures in that university. He was appointed a justice itinerant for the counties of Nottingham and Derby in 1245, and his name appears as a justiciary or judge of the Aula Regis on the Fine Rolls in 1249 and in each of the next seventeen years, written indifferently Bratton and Bretton, which circumstance has led Selden and others to attribute to him the authorship of the earliest treatise on the law of England in the French tongue, known as Bretone or Bretoun. In 1254 the king assigned to him by letters patent, in which he was designated “dilectus clericus noster,” the use of a house in London belonging to William late earl of Derby during the minority of the heir, and in 1263 he was collated to the archdeaconry of Barnstaple. This office, however, he resigned in the following year; and in 1265 he was appointed chief justiciary, and held that office until the end of 1267, when all notice of him ceases. He w ’ rote a most comprehensive and systematic work on the laws of England in five volumes, entitled De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Anglioe, which is modelled after the Institutes of Justinian, and is supposed, from internal evidence, to have been completed about the time when he was appointed chief justiciary, as it contains references to changes in the law made shortly before that time, but takes no notice of the statute of Marlborough passed in 52 Henry III. A Latin abridgment of Bracton’s work was written by Gilbert de Thornton, who was appointed Chief-Justice of the King’s Bench in the 17th year ...