Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/244

 230 //. FROM THE 1100' S TO THE 1800' S The Prerogative Court of the Archbishop, which dealt with wills and intestacies was established by Archbishop Staf- ford in 1443, who transferred the jurisdiction of the Court of Arches over those matters to the New Court, presided over by a Commissary.^ The first Commissary was Alexander Provert, Bachelor of Canon law. But the Ordinary's power in intestacy became useless after the Reformation, owing to the refusal of the Common Law Courts to enforce the directions of the Ordinary, or the Ecclesiastical bonds for due performance of their duties which he took from administrators.^ This unsatisfactory state of things resulted in the Statute of Distributions, which gave the Ordinaries and ecclesiastical judges, " having power to commit administrations of the goods of persons dying intestate," power to take bonds for the due administra- tion of the estate, which should be enforceable in Courts of the law. ^ We have thus traced, as far as the lack of evidence allows, the process by which the Clerical Courts acquired the juris- diction over all matters connected with wills and testaments. This jurisdiction, once obtained, was exercised on the lines of the Canon and Civil laws : as Hale says,* " where the Canon law is silent, the Civil law is taken in as a director, especially in points of exposition and determination touching wills and legacies," and these " directions of the Civil law " have been adopted by the Chancery in cases involving the construction of documents and wills. The original jurisdiction of the Ecclesiastical Courts in cases laesionis fidei, over contracts not enforceable by the King's courts, and its influence on the works of Glanvil and Bracton have already been referred to. 4. Roman Law in the Admiralty The early history of the " Court of Admiralty proceeding according to the Civil law," as Coke terms it, is closely con- % C^c(^ T) 55 •22 and 23 Ch. II. c. 10, made perpetual by 1 Jac. II. c. 17 § 18.
 * Coote, p. 81.
 * Hale, Common Law, p. 28.