Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/196

 182 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S He is best known to English law-students as the man who spoke light words of Littleton and thus attracted Coke's thunderbolt ; ^^ but if he thought badly of Littleton, he thought badly of Tribonian also, and would have been the last man to preach a Reception. Professor Alberigo Gentili of Oxford, he too was protestant enough and could rail at the canonists by the hour; but then he as an Italian had a bitter feud with the French humanizers, and stood up for the medieval gloss.^® Plainly the story is not simple and we must hurry past it. Still the perplexity of detail should not obscure the broad truth that there was pleasant reading in the Byzantine Code to Coke upon Littleton {First Iristitute). The words of Hotman which moved Coke to wrath will be found in De verbis feudalibus commen- tarius (F. Hotmani Opera, ed. 1599, vol. ii., p. 913) s. v. feodum. Hot- man remarks that the English use the word fee (longissime tamen a Langobardici iuris ratione et instituto) to signify " praedia omnia quae perpetuo iure tenentur." He then adds that Stephanus Pasquerius (the famous fetienne Pasquier) had given him Littleton's book: " ita incon- dite, absurde et inconcinne scriptum, ut facile appareat verissimum esse quod Polydorus Virgilius in Anglica Historia de iure Anglicano testatus est, stultitiam in eo libro cum malitia et calumniandi studio certare." To a foreign " feudist " Littleton's book would seem absurd enough, because in England the feudum had become the general form in which all land-ownership appeared. Brvmner {Deutsche Rechtsge- sehichte, vol. ii., p. 11) puts this well: "Wo jedes Grundeigentum sich in Lehn verwandelt, wird das Lehn, wie die Entwicklung des englischen Rechtes zeigt, schliesslich zum Begriff des Grundeigentums." I have not found in Polydore Virgil's History anything about Little- ton. There is a passage however in lib. ix. (ed. Basil. 1556, p. 154) in which he denounces the unjust laws imposed by William the Conqueror and (so he says) still observed in his own day: " Non possum hoc loco non memorare rem tametsi omnibus notam, admiratione tamen longe dignissimam, atque dictu incredibilem : eiusmodi namque leges quae ab omnibus intelligi deberent, erant, ut etiam nunc sunt, Normanica lingua scriptae, quam neque Galli nee Angli recte callebant." Among the badges of Norman iniquity is trial by jury, which Polydore cannot find in the laws of Alfred. This Italian historiographer may well be speak- ing what was felt by many Englishmen in Henry VIII's day when he holds up to scorn and detestation " illud terribile duodecim virorum indicium." Fisher and More were tried by jury. Biog. For his attack on canon law see De nuptiis, lib. i., c. 19. For his quarrel with the "elegant" Frenchmen, see De iuris interpretibuB dialogi sex. The defenders of the new learning and the mos Gallicus, as it was called, threw at their adversaries the word " barbarian " ; the retort of the conservative upholders of the mos Italicus was " mere grammarian." By expelling such men as the Gentilis, Italy forfeited her pre-eminence in the world of legal study. Nevertheless it is said that both in France and Germany the practiciJ Roman law of the courts
 * • Coke, Introductory Letter to Part 10 of the Reports, and Preface
 * For Gentili see Holland, Inaugural Lecture, 1874, and Diet. Nat.