Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/254

234 234 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. ' and Englishmen for whom the language of Alfred's time, if not of the Confessor's, was ceasing to be intelligible. These works were partly mere compilation of earlier documents executed with tolerable faithfulness, though not always with adequate knowledge ; partly attempts at restating the old customary laws, with improvements of detail and explanation, in the form of a continuous text-book ; and, in one well-known case, a mixture of half-understood fact with impudent fiction, which brings in, amongst other strange matter, a legend of King Arthur of Britain having conquered and converted Norway and the Baltic lands as far as Russia.^ This ingenious way of disguising the Danish conquest of England seems to have been too bold even for twelfth-century readers; Malory's picture, three centuries and a half later, of Arthur receiving the keys of Rome from the " Potestate " is more plausible. These books, however, or portions of them, certainly supplied a want and had a considerable vogue. If they had been mere exercises of students, they would not have been preserved as they have been. For a time some of them were probably used as books of practice, though the actual usage of the court must always have prevailed. From this quarter we hear nothing of the King's new jurisdiction. The writers were concerned only with the old custom, and they ap- parently believed, or hoped some one would believe, that there were still different bodies of provincial custom not only for the Danelaw and for the rest of England, but for Mercia and Wessex.^ Anti- quarianism is mixed with little bits of rationalizing and occasional attempts to show off foreign learning in a way that makes it very difficult to know how much is to be taken seriously. But in any case we have to do here with a real wave of national feeling, curiously enough almost coinciding with that first general revival of letters after the Dark Ages which has been called the lesser Renaissance. It was strictly national as not being confined to any class ; it was active in the mind and in the words of many who hardly knew the English tongue. From this impulse men took 1 Such are in brief the characters of (a) the " Quadripartitus," only of late known to us in its proper form, and to some extent the " Leges Willelmi ; " (b) the " Leges Heniici Primi ; " (c) the " Leges Edwardi Confessoris," which pretend to be an authentic return of the old customs made under William I. See P. & M. i. 76-82. Roughly speak- ing, the veracity of a book of this kind varies inversely as the authority of the writer claims for it. None of the writers seem to have been of English speech or race. 2 We know that the local courts had their own different usages ; but nothing is said of larger provincial customs in any authentic source of information after the Conquest.