Common law
The common lawso named because it was "common" to all the king's courts across Englandoriginated in the practices of the courts of the English kings in the centuries following the Norman Conquest in 1066. Prior to the Norman Conquest, much of England's legal business took place in the local folk courts of its various shires and hundreds. A variety of other individual courts also existed across the land: urban boroughs and merchant fairs held their own courts, as did the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and large landholders also held their own manorial and seigniorial courts as needed. Additionally, the Catholic Church operated its own court system that adjudicated issues of canon law.
Commonwealth v. Hunt
As a result of the spate of convictions against combinations of laborers, the typical narrative of early American labor law states that, prior to "Hunt" in Massachusetts in 1842, peaceable combinations of workingmen to raise wages, shorten hours or ensure employment were illegal in the United States, as they had been under English common law. In England, criminal conspiracy laws were first held to include combinations in restraint of trade in the Court of the Star Chamber early in the 17th Century. The precedent was solidified in 1721 by "The King v. Journeymen Tailors of Cambridge", which found tailors guilty of a conspiracy to raise wages. Leonard Levy went so far as to refer to "Hunt" as the "Magna Carta of American trade-unionism," illustrating its perceived standing as the major point of divergence in the American and English legal treatment of unions which, "removed the stigma of criminality from labor organizations."