[5][6] He appears to have been Recorder of Coventry in 1450; he was made Escheator of Worcestershire, and in 1447/8 he was under-sheriff of the same county; he became sergeant-at-law in 1453 and was afterwards a Justice of Assize on the northern circuit.

[3] Littleton married, before Easter term 1447, Joan Burley (died 22 March 1505), widow of Sir Philip Chetwynd (died 10 May 1444) of Ingestre, Staffordshire, and daughter and coheiress of William Burley, esquire, Speaker of the House of Commons, of Broncroft in Corvedale, Shropshire, by his first wife, Ellen Grendon, daughter and co-heiress of John de Grendon of Gayton, by whom he had three sons and two daughters: [7][8] Through his three sons, he became an ancestor of the families holding the peerages of Cobham (formerly Lyttelton) and Hatherton.

His youngest son Thomas's descendants became another line of Littleton baronets, named for Stoke Milburgh, Shropshire.

[3] Under Henry II, the courts had been organised, and the practice of keeping regular records of the proceedings had been carefully observed.

The centralising influence of the royal courts and of the justices of assize, working steadily through three centuries, had made the rules governing the law of property uniform throughout the land; local customs were confined within certain prescribed limits, and were only recognised as giving rise to certain well defined classes of rights, such, for instance, as the security of tenure acquired by villains by virtue of the custom of the manor, and the rights of freeholders, in some towns, to dispose of their land by will.

Thus, by the time of Littleton (Henry VI and Edward IV), an immense mass of material had been acquired and preserved in the rolls of the various courts.

Although it had been provided by a statute of Edward III that viva voce proceedings in court should no longer be conducted in the French tongue, "which was much unknown in the realm," the practice of reporting proceedings in that language and of using it in legal treatises lingered till a much later period and was, at length, prohibited by a statute passed in the time of the Commonwealth in 1650.

[citation needed] The book is written on a definite system and is the first attempt at a scientific classification of rights over land.

His book is thus much more than a mere digest of judicial decisions; to some extent, he pursues the method that gave Roman law its breadth and consistency of principle.

Littleton, in like manner, is constantly stating and solving, by reference to principles of law, cases that may or may not have occurred in actual practice.

[15] The second book relates to the reciprocal rights and duties of lord and tenant and is mainly of historical interest to the modern lawyer.

It contains a complete statement of the law as it stood in Littleton's time relating to homage, fealty, and escuage, the money compensation to be paid to the lord in lieu of military service to be rendered to the king, a peculiar characteristic of English as distinguished from Continental feudalism.

If the condition was not fulfilled, the interest of the mortgagee became absolute, and Littleton gives no indication of any modification of this strict rule, such as was introduced by courts of equity, permitting the debtor to redeem his land by payment of all that was due to the mortgagee, although the day of payment had passed and his interest had become, at law, indefeasible.

Although nothing was more opposed to the spirit of Norman feudalism than that a tenant of lands should dispose of them by will, we find Littleton directing, by his own will, the "feoffees" (trustees) of certain manors to make estates to the persons named in his will.

This conscientious obligation was recognized and enforced by the Lord Chancellor, and thus arose the class of equitable interests in lands.

Littleton was the first writer on English law after these rights had risen into a prominent position, and it is curious to find to what extent they are ignored by him.

In 1766 (second edition 1779) David Hoüard, a Norman advocate, published the Tenures under the title of Anciennes Loix des François conservées dans les coutumes angloises, arguing that they were derived from, and thus the best evidence for, early French customary law.

With or without commentary, The Tenures formed an important part of legal education for almost three centuries and a half and is still cited in the courts of England and the United States as an authority on the feudal law of real estate.