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.
Penal bond
Unsurprisingly, this caused friction between the common law courts and the Court of Chancery, which came to a head in 1614 over whether the Chancery Court could properly issues injunctions in cases upon which the common law courts had already passed judgment. In the case of "Courtney v. Glanville and Allen", which grew out of a particularly egregious example of fraud underlying a debt, Chief Justice Coke, judge and leading advocate of the common law, sought to challenge the authority of the Chancery Court to review decisions already made by the common law courts. As the common law courts had already given judgment for Glanville and Allen, Coke argued that the Chancery Court could not properly rule on the case so as to give an injunction which ran contrary to the action of the common law court. Eventually, this particular dispute became wrapped up in a wider rift between common law and Chancery in the "Earl of Oxford’s case", culminating in a stinging rebuke of the common law courts delivered by King James I, re-affirming the Chancery Court’s right and duty to the people to review those decisions of the common law courts which may have been manifestly unjust.