Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/280

 266 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S Reformation a body of law and a body of judges, for eccle- siastical and allied questions, quite apart from the law and judicial staff of the secular courts; and, with the growth of the Universities, she begins to have educational machinery for training her lawyers. In this department of work, how- ever, the scientific study has a long start and advantage over ^ the empirical. The common law has to be learned by prac- ^^^ tising in the courts, or by attending on their sessions.' The apprentices and Serjeants of the Inns of Court learn their work in London ; their study is in the year books and the statute book, a valuable and even curiously interesting ac- cumulation of material, but thoroughly insular, or less than that, simply English. The canonists and civilians have also their house in London, the ' Hospitium dominorum advoca- torum de arcubus,' but they are scarcely less at home at Rome and Avignon. The canonist and civilian learn the legal language of entire Christendom ; the London lawyer sticks to his Norman-French. The Norman-French of West- minster is unintelligible beyond the Channel and beyond the border. Scotland, the sister kingdom, is toiling without a common law system at all until, in the sixteenth century, James V introduces the law of Justinian as her treasury of common law, and thus gains University training and for- eign experience for her lawyers : but England has an ancient system and is content with her own superiority ; her common law is of native growth, strengthening with the strength of her people; she sees the nations that have accepted the civil law sinking under absolutism ; as distinctly as ever ' non vult leges Angliae mutari.* But she has ceased to banish the skilled jurist. Oxford and Cambridge have their schools of both the faculties. The civil law at Oxford had its schools from the fourteenth century in Cat Street, on the north of S. Mary's, in Schidyard Street, and in the great civil law school in S. Edward's parish where Archbishop Warham learned law. The canon law school was in the- neighbour- hood of S. Edward's church also, and was rebuilt in 1489 by subscription of the canonists. Wood enumerates no less than seven distinct sets of Scholae Legum, the majority being for civil law. In the colleges legal study has its proper