Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/183

 6. M AIT LAND: THE RENAISSANCE 169 moral was a memorable sign of the times. Nevertheless the fact remains that, had it not been for his last will and testa- ment, we should hardly have known Sir Robert except as an English lawyer who throve so well in his profession that he became Chief Justice of the Common Bench. And the rest of the acts of Robert Rede — we might say — and the arguments that he urged and the judgments that he pro- nounced, are they not written in queer old French in the Year Books of Henry VII and Henry VIII.'' Those ancient law reports are not a place in which we look for humanism or the spirit of the Renaissance: rather we look there for an amazingly continuous persistence and development of medi- eval doctrine. Perhaps we should hardly believe if we were told for the first time that in the reign of James I a man who was the contemporary of Shakespeare and Bacon, a very able man too and a learned, who left his mark deep in English history, said, not by way of paradox but in sober earnest, said re- peatedly and advisedly, that a certain thoroughly medieval book written in decadent colonial French was " the most perfect and absolute work that ever was written in any human science." ^ Yet this was what Sir Edward Coke said of a small treatise written by Sir Thomas Littleton, who, though he did not die until 1481, was assuredly no child of the Renaissance. I know that the names of Coke and Littleton when in conjunction are fearsome names or tiresome, and in common honesty I am bound to say that if you stay here you will be wearied. Still I feel that what is at fault is not my theme. A lecturer worthy of that theme would — I am sure of it — be able to convince you that there is some human interest, and especially an interest for English-speaking mankind, in a question which Coke's words suggest : — How was it and why was it that in an age when old creeds of many kinds were crumbling and all knowledge was being transfigured, in an age which had revolted against its predecessor and was fully conscious of the revolt, one body of doctrine and a ' Coke, Introductory Letter to Part 10 of the Reports, and Preface to First Institute.