Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/156

 142 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S learn so much — and so little. Apparently, before Edward's day, the right of the judgment creditor to seize the chattels of his debtor, through the hands of the sheriff, had become generally recognised. But the strongest instincts of feudal- ism were opposed to the suggestion that a debtor's land might be sold for payment of his debts, and a new tenant thus imposed upon his lord. And feudal instincts were, in this respect, as in so many others, powerfully supported by still older social instincts, surviving from an age in which land was not the property of the individual, but of the clan or kindred, and when to admit that the sacredness of the kin group might be disturbed by the intrusion of the creditor of one of its members, would have been regarded as little short of blasphemy. But the rapid progress of industry, and the rapid decay of patriarchal and feudal institutions, in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, had really rendered this antiquated rule a relic of barbarism and a cloak of injustice. Now that the services of nearly all tenants, except those in the lowest- ranks, had been commuted into money, now that the coheirs! of a deceased landowner could obtain the assistance of th« King's courts to effect a division of their inheritance, it was] absurd to maintain the fiction of patriarchal and feudal! connection. It was, clearly, the duty of the lawgiver to express in formal terms that revolution of social ideas which | had actually taken place, and to carry the revolution to its! legitimate issue. This, in fact, is just what Edward did in his famous Statute (passed even before the death of Llywelyn at Orewin Bridge), at the manor of his Chancellor, Robert Burnell, Bishop of Bath and Wells, near Shrewsbury, on the 12th October, 1283. The so-called " Parliament of Acton Bur- nell " has no more claim to constitutional importance than the so-called Parliament House, which professes to be the very building in which it sat ; for the body which best deserved the title of Parliament was then sitting at Shrews- bury, seven miles away, and the Statute was probably drawn up and promulgated, as it professes to be, by the King and his Council, i. e., the small body of officials who accompanied