Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/200

 186 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S he wrote at Toulouse in 1565 — a remarkable feat, for he had no English books at hand ^® — became a classic in the next century, and certainly did not underrate those tradi- tional, medieval, Germanic and parliamentary elements which were still to be found in English life and law under the fifth and last of the Tudors. Nevertheless I think that a well- equipped lecturer might persuade a leisurely audience to perceive that in the second quarter of the sixteenth century the continuity of English legal history was seriously threat- ened.^'' " Smith to Haddon, 6 Ap. 1565, in G. Haddoni Orationes, Lond. 1567, pp. 302-7 : " nostrarum legum ne unum quidem librum mecum attuli hie nee habebam iure consultos quos consulerem." He has been telling how he wrote The Commonwealth of England. " From the time of Bracton to the present day Englishmen have often allowed themselves phrases which exaggerate the practical prevalence of Roman law on the continent of Europe. Smith, for instance, who had been in many parts of northern France and was a learned and observant man, must have known that (to use Voltaire's phrase) he often changed law when he changed horses and that the Estates General had lately been demanding a unification of the divergent customs (Vi- oUet, Histoire du droit civil franqais, p. 202; Planiol, Droit civil, 1900, vol. i., p. 16). Germans, who know what an attempt to administer Roman law really means, habitually speak of French law as distinctively un-Roman. Thus Rudolph Sohm (Frankisches Recht und romisches Recht, Weimar, 1880, p. 76) : " die Gesetzbiicher Napoleons I. zeigen, dass noch heute wenigstens das Privatrecht und Processrecht Frank- reichs ein Abkommling nicht des romischen, noch des italienischen, sondern des frankischen Rechtes ist." So Planiol (op. cit., vol. i., p. 26): " Deux courants se sont trouv^s en presence lors de i'unification du droit francjais: I'esprit romain et les traditions coutumiferes. Ce sont ces derniferes qui I'ont emport6. Le Code a 6t6 r^digd a Paris, en plein pays coutumier; les conseillers d'fitat appartenaient en majorite aux pro- vinces septentrionales ; le parlement de Paris avait eu dans I'ancien droit un r61e preponderant. II n'y a done rien d'etonnant k voir I'esprit des coutumes predominer dans le Code; le contraire eGt dte un non-sens historique." Until the other day it was, I believe, a common remark that the large part of Germany which stood under the French code either in a translated or untranslated form — and this part contained about one-sixth of the Empire's population — was the part of Germany in which the law was least Roman and most Germanic. The division of France into two great districts was not equal: before the acquisition of Elsass from Germany " les pays de droit ecrit comprenaient a peine les deux cinquifemes de la France" (Planiol, op. cit., vol. i., p. 11). See the usful map in Brissaud, Histoire du droit franqais, p. 152. Even in the south there was much customary law. A famous sentence in the custumal of Bordeaux placed "the written law" below "natural reason" (Viollet, op. cit., p. 150). Still it is not to be denied that a slow process of romanization — very different from the catastrophic Reception in Germany — went on steadily for some five or six centuries; and a system which as a whole seems very un-Roman to a student of what became " the common law " of Germany may rightly seem Roman