Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/236

208 himself up to unbounded licence; but for some years his vices were all private. In, however, he was attacked, at the instigation of his sister Lucilla, by an assassin, who declared that he struck in the name of the senate; and the nobility paid the penalty by the murder of any of that rank who afterwards aroused the slightest suspicion in the mind of the emperor. At the same time the vulgar vanity of Commodus manifested itself in a manner that exposed him to the scorn of the meanest citizen. No longer content with showing his strength and dexterity to a little group of favourites in the palace, he presented himself as a spectacle in the arena, and, carefully protected from serious danger, displayed his skill by shooting hundreds of wild animals, and by meeting in fight hundreds of gladiators. He called himself the Roman Hercules, and commanded that he should be worshipped as such. Plots against his life naturally began to spring up. That of his favourite Perennis was discovered in time. The next danger was from the people, who were infuriated by the dearth of corn. The mob repelled the prætorian guard, but the execution of the hated minister, Oleander, quieted the tumult. The attempt also of the daring highwayman Maternus to seize the empire was betrayed; but at last Eclectus the emperor's chamberlain, Lætus the prefect of the prætorians, and his mistress Marcia, finding their names on the list of those doomed to death, united to destroy him. He was poisoned, and then strangled by a wrestler named Narcissus, on the 31st December, in the thirty-second year of his age. It was said that he had intended to disgrace the office of consul by taking the auspices at the commencement of a new year of office, not in the consular robe but in the garb of a secutpr, and surrounded not by the senate but by a band of gladiators. His guards alone, accustomed to his lavish bounty, regretted his death; and Pertinax, being chosen by the conspirators, was allowed quietly to succeed him.  COMMON LAW, like civil law, is a phrase with many shades of meaning, and it is probably safest to define it with reference to the various things to which it is opposed. It is contrasted with statute law, as law not promulgated by the sovereign body ; with equity, as the law prevailing between man and man, unless when the Court of Chancery assumes jurisdiction ; and with local or customary law, as the general law for the whole realm, tolerating variations in certain districts and under certain conditions. It is also sometimes contrasted with civil, or canon, or interna tional law, which are foreign systems recognized in certain special courts only and within limits defined by the common law. As against all these contrasted kinds of law, it may be described broadly as the universal law of the realm, which applies wherever they have not been introduced, and which is supposed to have a principle for every possible case. Occasionally, it would appear to be used in a sense which would exclude the law developed by at all events the more recent decisions of the courts. Blackstone divides the civil law of England into lex scripta, or statute law, and lex non scripta, or common law. The latter, he says, consists of (I) general customs, which are the common law strictly so called, (2) particular customs prevailing in certain districts, and (3) laws used in particular courts. The first is the law by which &quot; proceed ings and determinations in the king s ordinary courts of justice are guided and directed.&quot; That the eldest son alone is heir to his ancestor, that a deed is of no validity unless sealed and delivered, that wills shall be construed more favourably and deeds more strictly, are examples of common law doctrines, &quot; not set down in any written statute or ordinance, but depending on immemorial usage for their support.&quot; The validity of these usages is to be determined by the judges &quot;the depositaries of the law, the living oracles who must decide in all cases of doubt, and who are bound by an oath to decide according to the law of the land.&quot; Thei r judgments are preserved as records, and &quot; it is an established rule to abide by former precedents where the same points come again in litigation.&quot; Ths extraordinary deference paid to precedents is the source of the most striking peculiarities of the English common law. .There can be little doubt that it was the rigid adherence of the common law courts to established precedent which caused the rise of an independent tribunal administering justice on more equitable principles the tribunal of the chancellor, the Court of Chancery. And the common law courts the Queen s Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer have always, as compared with the Court of Chancery, been distinguished for a certain narrowness and technicality of reasoning. At the same time the common law has never been a fixed or rigid system. In the application of old precedents to ths changing circumstances of society, and in the development of new principles to meet new cases, the common law courts have displayed an immense amount of subtlety and ingenuity and a great deal of sound sense. The continuity of the system is not less remarkable than its elasticity. Two great defects of form disfigure the English law. The first is the separation of common law and equity. Ths second is the overwhelming mass of precedents in which the law is embedded. The recent Judicature Act is an attempt to remedy the first by merging the jurisdiction of all the courts in one supreme court, and causing equitable principles to prevail over those of the common law where they differ. The second can only be removed by some well-conceived scheme of the nature of a code or digest (see ). The English common law may be described as a pre-eminently national system. Based on Saxon customs, moulded by Norman lawyers, and jealous of foreign systems, it is, as Bacon says, as mixed as our language and as truly national.  COMMON PLEAS, (Communia Placita), was one of the three common law courts at Westminster- the other two being the Queen s Bench and Exchequer. The jurisdiction of all three, together with that of the Court of Chancery, the Court of Probate and Matrimonal Causes, and the Court of Bankruptcy, is vested in the new High Court of Justice, established by the Judicature Act, 1873. One division of that court is called the Common Pleas division, and there all the business which before the Act was &quot; within the exclusive cognizance of the Court of Common Pleas &quot; must still be transacted.  COMMON PRAYER, See.  COMMONS. It is a well-known result of the application of the historical method to laws and institutions, that it has reversed many of our leading conceptions of the natural or original forms of property. That the primitive form of property in land was not severalty but commonalty, that land was held not by individuals but by communities, and that individual ownership was slowly evolved out of common ownership, are propositions as nearly as possible the opposite of our a priori ideas on the subject. The existence of rights of common is one of the traces of the ancient system still remaining in our law, but its real significance was for a long time obscured by the feudal theories on which the law of real property is based. There seems to be good reason to believe that among the English, as among other Teutonic nations, the system of land-holding by village communities prevailed. For an account of that system reference may be made to Sir H. Maine s lectures, or to the short essay by Professor Nasse, a translation of which has been published by the Cobden Club (On the Agricultural Community of the Middle Ages). It may be sufficient to state here the bare outlines of the system. The &quot;mark, or territory occupied by the community, 