Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/292

 278 //. FROM THE nOO'S TO THE 1800'S civilians, and common lawyers ; the number thirty-two was reduced to eight ; practically the work was done by Peter Martyr, the Oxford Professor of Divinity, under Cranmer's eye, and the result was the compilation known as the Refor- matio Legum; a curious congeries of old and new material which really pleased no party ; showing too much respect for antiquity and divine ordinance to please the Puritan, and too little to satisfy the men who had guided the Reforma- tion under Henry VIII and those who were to do so under Elizabeth. The legislation and policy of Mary were directed to uproot everything that Edward VI had originated; his bishop? appointed * quamdiu se bene gesserint,' were dispossessed without a struggle; his laws were repealed, many of them never to be revived ; his advisers, where they would not com- ply, were exiled or burned: but the efforts to reinstate the old system were not successful ; the monastic property could not be restored; the ranks of the lower clergy, reduced to a fraction by the abolition of chauntries and private masses, could not be recruited; and all the restored fabric hung on the life of a woman and a few worn-out old men. For the moment the canon lawyers lifted up their heads, and a few civilians took the doctorate of decrees at Oxford and Cambridge; but the complete extinction of reactionary forces, on Mary's death, showed that the Papal system, with all that was dangerous to national life contained in it, was, so far as England was concerned, practically extinct: six years of blood and fire, of tears and prayers, of cruel jealousies and heartbreaking divisions, wrought this; and Elizabeth for some years after her accession had before her a task, not certainly easy, but not encumbered with insuper- able difficulties. The subject which we are treating now contracts its limits ; for to attempt anything like circumstantial discussion of the legal history of a period into which ecclesiastical quarrels so largely enter, would be to lose oneself at once in a wilderness of controversy. I must content myself with a few generali- sations and a few significant facts. The Elizabethan settle- ment in Church and State was a compromise, satisfactory