of the fourteenth century coincides with Parliament's first assertions of its powers. Already, it had come to be the principal and only legislative body, and the dominant interest in it was that of the common law lawyers. This had become a narrow profession. The Crown adopted the practice of appointing judges from the leading practitioners of the bar. These also controlled legal education. There was no liberal outlook on the law. To these, Bracton's treatise must have seemed impractical and academic. Justice became more centralised. Prior to Bracton, there was little use of stare decisis. This was because the rolls containing the court records were largely unavailable for scrutiny, even by judges sitting on the bench. Bracton's use of the rolls led to promulgation of recorded cases in the form of a gloss. This had been an important innovation based on the glossator's practice from the Continent. The availability of previous decisions, even if 20 or more years old, proved to be of great interest to nearly all practitioners of the law. This led directly to the Year Books. A single unique decision did not make precedent. Custom began to be dictated when several cases of similar fact pattern were decided by different courts in the same way. This was the beginning of stare decisis. Sir Thomas Smith, the Secretary of State for Queen Elizabeth wrote "De Republica Anglorum" in 1583. In it he set forth the truly fearful powers of the Crown and Parliament, which can make and unmake law, change rights and possessions of private men, legitimate bastards, establish religions, condemn or absolve (by attainders) whomever the Prince wills. Smith was no advocate of tyranny, but he clearly enjoyed enumerating an imposing list of powers of the Tudor state. In Bracton, on the other hand, the emphasis was not upon the power of the Crown, but in responsibility. The monarch was subject to God, to the law of the land, and to his feudal court. In Bracton, the king owed some responsibility to listen to his lords. (Recall that Bracton had observed and experienced the turmoil from the Barons' War, and lived in the backwash of the problems of John.) Bracton's writings became a de facto antidote to the absolutism of the Tudors and the Stuarts. Bracton brought an air of clarity, from his study of Roman order, to the confusion that followed the English Reformation. The anonymous