Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/282

 r 268 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S the canon law must have worked three years at the Digest ,nd three at the Decretals, and studied theology also for Wo years. It is, you observe, not the national church law, but the universal or scientific material, on which he is em- ployed. In a great number of cases the degrees were taken at the same time; but as the era of the Reformation ap- proaches, the canonists become more numerous than the civil- ians at Cambridge, and probably at Oxford also. But these points belong to a view of the subject on which I cannot pretend to enter now ; and indeed it is in the conflict of laws rather than the conflict of studies that the present interest of the subject lies. In the next lecture I shall have to recur for some points to the ground which I have attempted to cover in this, for the struggles and jealousies of the rival and allied systems of jurisprudence do not date from the Reformation only. Here, however, I stop now, having in a cursory way traced the history of the materials of the canonical jurisprudence so far down. We shall have to begin by looking at the later history from the theological as well as from the legal side, and to follow it through the Reformation period, steering clear, as much as possible, of questions of modern controversy. II IN the first of these two public lectures I attempted to give a sketch of the growth of the Canon Law; its origin and materials, its introduction into England and the limits of authority which it attained here, its relation to -t^i«-«fvil law of Rome, and the distinction between the scientific study of the Decretals in the Universities and the professional use of the Provinciale in the Ecclesiastical Courts. The second branch of the subject, as I proposed to treat it in opening the lecture, is the history of its working in competition with and in general relations to other systems of law: a branch of the discussion which compels us at once to go back to the very root of the subject. Canon law as a code, and the civil law of Rome as a treasury of procedure, working to-