Sir John Fortescue, an English lawyer, who lived in the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV. The place and date of his birth are unknown; he is supposed to have died about 1485. In 1426 he was appointed one of the governors of Lincoln's Inn, and in 1442 chief justice of the king's bench, He was a zealous Lancastrian, and when in 1401 the fortune of war made Henry VI. a fugitive, Fortescue accompanied him to Scotland, where Henry is supposed to have appointed him chancellor of England, by which title he has been mentioned by several writers. Soon afterward the Yorkists, who at that period controlled the parliament, included him in the act of attainder which was passed by them against the king, queen, and other prominent Lancastrians. In 1464 he tied to the continent with Queen Margaret and her son Edward, and remained abroad several years attending on the royal exiles. He returned with them to England, but after the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471 he became a prisoner to the victor, Edward IV. Having obtained his pardon and liberty, he withdrew to Gloucestershire, and there passed the rest of his life in retirement. The most celebrated of his works is his treatise Be Laudlbus Legum Anglioe, which is written in the form of a dialogue, the interlocutors being Prince Edward and the author.

The earliest edition is that of Whitechurch, published in the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII., and the latest that of A. Amos (Cambridge, 1825). The oldest translation is by Mulcaster (London, 1516).