Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/179

 6. JENKS: EDWARD I 165 of the land. The clerkly skill of the Norman and the An- gevin official made ever more and more plain the habits and practices of the people. Greater and greater grew the col- lection of Plea Rolls which accumulated in the King's Ex- chequer. Thus the materials for a Common Law were collected. Then came a man with a great love of order and symmetry, a man capable of casting the work of the previous century into a compact and harmonious form. This man was Henry of Bratton, or, as we call him, " Bracton." No man could have been better fitted for the task. In spite of his borrow- ings from Azo, and his references to Digest and Institutes, he did not, perhaps, know very much of Roman Law. But he knew something of it, and, as a cathedral chancellor, he must also have known something of the Canon Law. But, above all, as an experienced royal justice, deeply learned in the practice of the royal courts, he had unique qualifi:- cations for his task. The vital point in his work is that, whilst occasionally borrowing the language and arrange- ment of the Roman Law, whilst courtly in his references to the King, and civil to his brother ecclesiastics, he draws the body and bones of his work from the records of the Bench and circuit courts. This fact, long suspected from internal evidence by intelligent students, has been finally established, within the last twenty years, by the discovery of the very materials used by Bracton in writing his great book. Hav- ing access, by virtue of his official position, to the Plea Rolls, he made from them a collection of some two thousand cases,* and from this collection he drew the rules which compose his book. For a century the work of assimilation had been going on throughout England, no doubt largely through the efforts of the justices themselves. A nation had been slowly born, with a consciousness of unity, and a willingness to give up minor differences for the sake of that unity. How much of the process was due to Bracton, how much to his predecessors, it is not possible to say, though, in many cases, we know gradofF in the British Museum in 1884, and has been lucidly edited by Professor Maitland, under the title of Bracton's Notebook (Cambridge Press, 1887).
 * The MS. containing these cases was discovered by Professor Vino-