Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/276

 262 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S the canon law could not be worked; if you take any well- drawn case of litigation in the middle ages, such as that of the monks of Canterbury against the archbishops, you will find that its citations from the Code and Digest are at least as numerous as from the Decretum. Moreover the accretions of the Decretum, the Extravagants as they were called, that is the authoritative sentences of the Popes which were not yet codified, were many of them conveyed in an- swers to English bishops, or brought at once to England by the clergy with the same avidity that lawyers now read the terminal reports in the Law Journal. The famous deci- sion which Glanville quotes about legitimation is embodied in what then was an Extravagant of Alexander III, delivered to the bishop of Exeter in 1172, founded no doubt on a Novel of Justinian but not till now distinctly made a part of church law. And this point further illustrates what I was saying: for it is the point on which the great dictum of the council of Merton turns in 1236. The English hatred of the foreigners was in that year fanned to white heat by the importation of the king's half-brothers and the new queen's uncles: it was an milucky moment for Grosseteste and the bishops to press that the English law of bastardy should be altered to suit the canon and civil law of Rome. The murmurs were already rising that William of Valence was going to change the constitution. Notwithstanding the influence of Grosseteste, the king and the barons declared story ; but it is perhaps not equally well known that the king had just a year before issued an order which stands in close parallelism with the banishment of Vacarius. By a letter to the Lord Mayor of London, dated Dec. 11, 1234, he had directed that no one should be allowed to hold law schools in the city of London or teach the Laws. What laws were these.'' Coke thought that the king referred to Magna Carta and the Carta de Forestis ; but Selden, and Prynne after him, pointed out that this was inconceivable; and that doubtless the Laws were the canon laws. I think that under the term Leges both civil and canon law were intended, but certainly at the moment the danger from the
 * Nolumus leges Angliae mutari.' That is a well-known