Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/103

 3. POLLOCK: ANGLO-SAXON LAW 89 celebrated case within the Queen's reign, in which, as it is now hardlj possible to doubt, the House of Lords reversed the ancient law of marriage accepted on the authority of the Church in England as well as in the rest of Western Christen- dom, being misguided by early documents of which they did not rightly imderstand either the authority or the effect.^ The extreme antiquities of our law may not be often required in practice, but it is not safe to neglect them altogether, and still less safe to accept uncritical explanations when it does become necessary to consider them. Anglo-Saxon life was rough and crude as compared not only with any modern standard but with the amount of civil- ization which survived, or had been recovered, on the Conti- nent. There was very little foreign trade, not much internal traffic, nothing like industrial business of any kind on a large scale, and (it need hardly be said) no system of credit. Such conditions gave no room for refined legal science applied by elaborate legal machinery, such as those of the Roman Empire had been and those of modern England and the commonwealths that have sprung from her were to be. Such as the men were, such had to be the rules and methods whereby some kind of order was kept among them. Our ancestors before the Norman Conquest lived under a judicial system, if system it can be called, as rudimentary in substance as it was cumbrous in form. They sought justice, as a rule, at their primary local court, the court of the hundred, which met once a month, and for greater matters at a higher and more general court, the county court, which met only twice a year.^ We say purposely met rather than sat. The courts we re open-air meetin gs of the freemen who were bound to "attend them, the suitors as they are called in the terms of Anglo-Norman and later medieval law ; there was no class of p rofe ssional lawyers ; there were no judges in our sense oi •fear ned persons speciall y appointed to preside, ex pound the law, and cause justice to be done ; the only learning available ness, which only a small number of the suitors attended: see P. & M., Hist. Eng. L. i. 526.
 * See Pollock and Maitland, Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 367 sqq.
 * There were probably intermediate meetings for merely formal busi-