Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/284

 270 //. FROM THE 1100*8 TO THE 1800'S I showed, the civil law was learned chiefly as the executive of the canon law, and it was by its relations to the canon law that it became practical and remunerative. I need not go into much detail about this, but, if I am speaking to any who attended my lectures on Ockham and Marsilius, they will remember how not only those great writers, but a crowd of minor ones, attack the canon law and its professors as the great enemies, not only of civil government but of vital religion : an exaggeration no doubt, but founded on a true principle. * Who,' says John of Salisbury, himself a canon- ist, ' ever rises pricked at heart from the reading of the laws, or even of the canons ? ' ^ The practice of these studies stood to theology, stood to religion itself, in the relation in which the casuistry of the confessional stood to true moral teaching. When however we turn, as we must do, to consider the attitude of the national law and the national lawyers, we see more distinctly how incompatible were the systems which, for four hundred years, from the Conquest to the Reforma- tion, stood side by side, with rival bodies of administrators and rival or conflicting processes. Look first .at the area lof matters with which the canon law assumed to deal: it '' / claimed jurisdiction over everything that had to do with / i^the souls of men, and I think there is scarcely a region of social obhgation into which, so defined, it would not claim to enter. It claimed authority over the clergy, in matters civil and criminal, in doctrine and practice, in morals and in manners, education and dress, in church and out. It claimed authority over all suits in which clergymen were parties, or in which ecclesiastical property was involved; I say, mark you, claimed, rather than exercised, for some of thfse are the points in which the struggle with the na- tional law arises. It claimed authority over the belief and morals of the laity, in the most comprehensive way. The whole of the matrimonial jurisdiction, the whole of the tes- tamentary jurisdiction was, we know, specially regarded as a branch of canon law ; but by its jurisdiction for cor- rection of life, ' pro salute animae,' it entered into every > Joh. Salisb. i. 196, epist. 138.