Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/216

 202 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S Court of Requests in which Prof. Smith and Prof. Haddon had done justice was being tried for its hfe. Its official defender was, we observe, Itahan by blood and Parisian by degree: Dr. Adelmare, known to Englishmen as Sir Julius Caesar.^^ That wonderful Edward Coke was loose. The medieval tradition was more than safe in his hands. You may think it pleasant to turn from this masterful, masterless man to his great rival. It is not very safe to say what Thomas More did not know, less safe to say what was unknown to Francis Bacon, but I cannot discover that either of these scholars, these philosophers, these statesmen, these law reformers, these schemers of ideal republics, these chan- cellors of the realm, these law lecturers, had more than a bowing acquaintance with Roman law. If Reginald Pole's dream had come true, if there had been a Reception — well, I have not the power to guess and you have not the time to hear what would have happened ; but I think that we should have had to rewrite a great deal of history. For example, in the seventeenth century there might have been a struggle between king and parliament, but it would hardly have been that struggle for the medieval, the Lancastrian, constitution in which Coke and Selden and Prynne and other ardent searchers of mouldering records won their right to be known to school-boys. In 1610 when the conflict was growing warm a book was burnt by the common hangman : it was written by an able man in whom Cambridge should take some pride, Dr. Cowell, our Regius Professor, and seemed to confirm the suspicion that Roman law and absolute monarchy went hand in hand.®* The profit and loss account would be a long affair. I must make no attempt to state it. If there was the danger of barbarism and stupidity on the one side, there was the danger of pedantry on the other: the pedantry that endeavours to •"See Mr. Leadam's Introduction to Select Pleas in the Court of Bequests (Seld. Soc.) and Diet. Nat. Biog. s. n. Caesar, Sir Julius. "See Gardiner, Hist. England, 1603-1642, vol. ii., pp. 66-68; E. C. Clark, Cambridge Legal Studies, pp. 74-75. Cowell's Institutiones (less known than the Interpreter) are an attempt, "in the main very able," so Dr. Clark says, to bring English materials under Roman rubrics. It is a book which might have played a part in a Reception; but it came too late.