Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/267

 8. STUBBS: THE CANON LAW 253 rules of penance continue to be elaborated in England to the time of the Conquest; and bear some analogy to the early laws of the Anglo-Saxon kings, which consist so largely of definitions of crimes and penalties. It is to be remembered, however, that the Penitentials were private compilations, the authority of which depended on the esti- mation or dignity of their authors, and not on any legisla- tive sanction ; but, notwithstanding that, there is sufficient harmony amongst them to show that they incorporate the rules on which the episcopal jurisdiction pure and simple generally proceeded; they were a sort of customary church law for their own province. But over and above these there were the canons, or authorised church law ; and of these also there was a series of important collections. I am unable to say how far the collection of Dionysius Exiguus was re- ceived in England and Ireland at first: but from the begin- ning of the Church History of United England, a series of new canons began to be added to the early collections: Theodore himself added the decisions of Roman and Byzan- tine councils to the resolutions of his own national synods: a great and important succession of Anglo-Saxon councils issued canons which were received with great respect in all the Western churches, as we know from S- Boniface's letterg and the remains of the canons themselves. From Ireland likewise proceed a great collection of canons — the famous Collatio Hibernica, which, beginning with the edicts of S. Patrick, went on to embody the results of ecclesiastical legislation in West and East, and, by the time of Dunstan, whose copy of it we possess in the Bodleian, had added by successive accretions all that was thought worth preserving even in the capitularies of the Frank kings. The Anglo- Saxon Church possessed no such comprehensive collection of its own; but abroad the codification of church law pro- ceeded rapidly. I have seen in the National Library at Paris some invaluable MS. collections earlier than the date of the forged decretals ; and the forged decretals themselves were probably not the work of one man or one generation. Not however to tread again this well-trodden path, pass on to the collectors of genuine or less suspected canons: