English law
Common law is a term with historical origins in the legal system of England. It denotes, in the first place, the judge-made law that developed from the early Middle Ages as described in a work published at the end of the 19th century, "The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I", in which Pollock and Maitland expanded the work of Coke (17th century) and Blackstone (18th century). Specifically, the law developed in England's Court of Common Pleas and other common law courts, which became also the law of the colonies settled initially under the crown of England or, later, of the United Kingdom, in North America and elsewhere; and this law as further developed after those courts in England were reorganised by the Supreme Court of Judicature Acts passed in the 1870s, and developed independently, in the legal systems of the United States and other jurisdictions, after their independence from the United Kingdom, before and after the 1870s. The term is used, in the second place, to denote the law developed by those courts, in the same periods (pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial), as distinct from within the jurisdiction, or former jurisdiction, of other courts in England: the Court of Chancery, the ecclesiastical courts, and the Admiralty court.
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.