Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 05.djvu/143

 case of the Oxfordshire election in 1754, when one of the questions raised was whether tenants holding by copy of court roll according to the custom of the manor, though not at the will of the lord, were freeholders qualified to vote in elections for knights of the shire. The case exciting great interest, Blackstone elaborately discussed the question in his ‘Considerations on Copyholders,’ tracing the history of the tenures in dispute, and arguing that they could not confer the freehold vote. The matter was settled by the passing of the act 31 Geo. II, cap. 14, which declared all tenants holding by copy of court roll incapable of voting. Apart from its own value, Blackstone's tract shows that he had made a far more careful study of the history of English tenures than his ‘Commentaries’ would lead one to imagine. But here, as elsewhere, he accepted too readily the conclusions of previous writers, never questioning, for instance, the theory, afterwards repeated in a balder form in the ‘Commentaries,’ and still almost universally received as true, that copyholders were originally villeins in a state of bondage, who after the Conquest, by the ‘good-nature and benevolence’ of their lords, had been permitted to hold their lands without interruption till finally they got fixity of tenure according to the custom of the manor. (Blackstone is not to blame for originating the theory; see Compleat Copyholder, sect. xxxii.;  Use of the Law;  Tenures, 3rd ed. p. 220;  Tenures, p. 155. A great part of the passage in the ‘Commentaries,’ in fact, is in Wright's words). In 1759 Blackstone brought out his first important work, an edition of the Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest. It contains the Articles of the Barons, the issues of the Great Charter in 1215, 1216, and 1217, with several charters of confirmation, the Charter of the Forest, and the Statute of Marlebridge. In a long introduction he traces the history of the charter up to the 29 Edw. I, and gives an account of the various manuscripts known to him, most of which he had himself examined (see in the Introd. to Statutes of the Realm the results of later research compared with Blackstone's work).

Some imperfect reports of his lectures having been circulated, and some having ‘fallen,’ as he says, ‘into mercenary hands, and become the object of clandestine sale,’ Blackstone determined to prepare them for publication in the form of a general survey of English law. The manuscript notes of his lectures, in his own handwriting, are in the library of the Incorporated Law Society. They are in four volumes, written with great neatness, and with scarcely a single erasure. He produced the first volume of the ‘Commentaries’ in 1765, and the other three volumes at intervals during the next four years. The work begins with his first Vinerian lecture on the study of the law, an elegant plea, once much admired, ‘that a competent knowledge of the laws of that society in which we live is the proper accomplishment of every gentleman and scholar’ (cf. the preface to Institutes). He goes on, by way of introduction, to discuss the nature of laws in general (in a chapter which, says Sir H. Maine, ‘may almost be said to have made Bentham and Austin into jurists by virtue of sheer repulsion’), the sources of English law, the countries subject to that law, and the legal divisions of England. In the exposition of the law he follows the arrangement of which he had published the outline on beginning his lectures (Analysis of the Law, 1754), and which in substance he adopted from Hale's ‘Analysis of the Civil part of the Law.’ He treats first of the rights commanded or recognised by the law, and secondly of the wrongs which it prohibits; rights again he divides, accepting Hale's unfortunate translation from Roman law, into rights of persons and rights of things (or property), and wrongs into private wrongs, or civil injuries, and public wrongs, or ‘crimes and misdemeanors.’ To each of these four divisions is allotted a volume (see a table representing in detail ‘the arrangement which seems to have been intended by Sir William Blackstone’ in, ii. 1018). The work closes with a chapter on the rise, progress, and gradual improvements of the laws of England, which is interesting as having suggested to Reeves the utility of a history of English law filled up with some minuteness upon the outline there drawn. The work thus covers the field of law, and though its critics have remarked some disproportion in its parts, such subjects as public law, equity, ecclesiastical law, and the constitution and jurisdiction of the courts receiving less than their due attention, yet there is a singular completeness in the whole.

Few books have been more successful than the ‘Commentaries.’ From his lectures, and from the sale of the work, he is said to have made altogether about 14,000l. (, Malone, p. 431; in Litteratur des Criminal-Rechts the sum is said to have been 16,000l.) Eight editions appeared in the author's lifetime, and the ninth edition was ready for publication. For sixty years after his death editions continued to follow