Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/64

54 between religion and law, and between those who administered them. Nevertheless, the evidence everywhere points to the conclusion we have already reached.

Beginning with heathen times there may be put first the facts which Sir George Dasent gives us respecting the ancient Norse. He writes:—

The priest "was the only civil, just as he was the only religious authority minister and magistrate in one."

"In trials … it fell on him [the priest] to name the judges, and to superintend the proceedings."

But it seems that even in those rude days there had come into existence non-clerical advocates.

"There were the lawmen or lawyers (lögmenn), a class which we shall find still flourishing in the time of which our Saga tells. They were private persons, invested with no official character." "They seem to have been simply law-skilled men, 'counsel' to whom men in need of advice betook themselves."

In harmony with these statements are those made by an authority respecting Old-English institutions, Mr. Gomme. He says—

"We learn from the historians of Saxony that the 'Frey Feldgericht' of Corbey was, in pagan times, under the supremacy of the priests of the Eresburgh."

"There can be little doubt that the church or temple of primitive society was the self-same spot as the assembly-place of the people and the court of justice."

In support of this last conclusion it may be remarked that as in early times gatherings for worship afforded occasions for trading, so they also afforded occasions for legal settlements of disputes; and further that the use of the sacred edifice for this purpose (as among the Babylonians) was congruous with the conception, everywhere anciently entertained, that legal proceedings tacitly or avowedly invoked divine interposition—tacitly in the taking of an oath and avowedly in trial by judicial combat.

The conquest of northern heathenism by Christianity gradually led to subjugation of the heathen system of law by the system of law the Church imposed—partly its own, the canon law, and partly that inherited from Roman civilization, the civil law. The rules of conduct which, transmitted from the heathen priesthood, had become the common law, were in large measure overridden by the rules of conduct which the Christian priesthood either enacted or adopted. In early English days lay and clerical magnates co-operated in the local courts: laws derived from the old religion and from the new religion were jointly enforced.

"The clergy, in particular, as they then engrossed almost every other branch of learning, so (like their predecessors, the British Druids), they