Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/186

 172 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S pened in 1620 at Wittenberg, but perhaps we do not often remember that when the German friar ceremoniously and contumehously committed to the flames some venerated law- books — this, if an event in the history of religion, was also an event in the history of jurisprudence. A current of new life was thrilling through one Corpus Juris ; ^^ the other had been sore stricken, and, if it escaped from violent death, might perish yet more miserably of a disease that becomes dangerous at the moment when it is discovered. A few years afterwards an enlightened young humanist, of high rank and marked ability, a man who might live to be pope of Rome or might live to be king of England, was saying much evil of the sort of law that Rede had admin- istered and taught ; was saying that a wise prince would banish this barbaric stuff and receive in its stead the civil law of the Romans. Such, so we learn from one of his friends, was the talk of Reginald Pole, and a little knowledge of what was happening in foreign countries is enough to teach us that such talk deserves attention.^ ^ S, p. 776.) Dareste (Essai sur Frangois Hotman, p. 2) marks the five years 1546-1551 as those in which " nos quatre grands docteurs du seizi^me si^cle" (Hotman, Baudouin, Cujas, Doneau) entered on their careers. "VioUet, Droit civil franqais, p. 25: " C'est le mouvement scientifique de la Renaissance qui, semblable a un courant, d'electricite, donno ainsi au vieux droit romain une vie nouvelle. Son autorit^ s'accroit par Taction d'une science, pleine de jeunesse et d'ardeur, d'une science qui, comme toutes les autres branches de I'activite humaine, s'6panouit et renait." Flach, in Nouvelle revue historique de droit, vol. vii., p. 222: "En France Cujas porte k son apogee le renom de I'ecole nouvelle. Quelle autre preoccupation cette 6cole pouvait-elle avoir que de faire revivre le veritable droit de la Rome ancienne, celui que la pratique avait touche de son souffle impur, celui qu'elle avait corrompu? " ^^Starkey's England, Early English Text Society, 1878, pp. 192 ff.; and see Letters and Papers, Henry VIII., vol. viii., pp. 81-84, and Ibid. vol. xii., pt. 1, pp. xxxii-xxxiv. Thomas Starkey was employed in the endeavour to win Reginald Pole to King Henry's side in the matter of the divorce from Catherine and the consequent breach with Rome. The negotiation failed, but Starkey took the opportunity of laying before Henry a dialogue which he (Starkey) had composed. The interlocutors in this dialogue were Pole and the well-known scholar Thomas Lupset, and Pole was represented as expounding his opinions touching political and ecclesiastical affairs. How far at all points Starkey fairly repre- sented Pole's views may be doubted. Still we have respectable evidence that Pole had talked in the strain of the following passage, and at any rate Starkey thought that in King Henry's eyes he was befriending Pole by making him speak thus. "Thys ys no dowte but that our law and ordur thereof ys over-