The history of arbitration procedures and extra-judicial forms of dispute settlement in medieval England remains largely unwritten. This neglect is no doubt attributable to the precocious development of the common law, which has monopolized the attention of English legal historians and left them little time to consider alternative forms of dispute resolution. Their main preoccupation, epitomized in the work of great scholars such as Maitland, Holdsworth and Plucknett, has been to trace the evolution of legal institutions, procedures and doctrine. Consideration of arbitration has at best been regarded as peripheral to this central task.