Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/350

 336 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S (except as respects Ireland), not by taking in new territories as parts of their State, but by planting semi-independent self-governing States which reproduce England.^ However, one may, for the sake of a comparison with Rome, take the five following epochs as those at which the process of change became the most swift and the most effective for destruction and' creation. II. Five Epochs of Legal Change in England [. The time of Henry II, when the King's Courts became organized, and began to evolve a Common Law for the whole realm out of the mass of local customs. 2. The times of Edward I and Edward III, when the solidi- V.- fication of the kingdom saw the creation of a partly repre- sentative legislature, the enactment of important statutes, and the establishment of a vigorous organ for the develop- ment and amendment of the law in the Chancellorship. 3. The time of Henry VIII and Edward VI, when the prog- ress of society and an ecclesiastical revolution caused the passing of several sweeping legal reforms, separated the courts and the law of England from a system of jurispru- dence which had influenced it in common with the rest of Western Christendom, and permanently reduced the power of the clergy and of clerical ideas. 4. The epoch of the Great Civil War and Revolution, when legislative authority, hitherto shared or disputed by the Crown and the Houses of Parliament, passed definitely to the latter, and particularly to the popular branch of Parliament, and when (as a consequence) the relation of the Monarch to the landholding aristocracy, and that of the State to its subj ects in religious matters, underwent profound alterations. 5. The reigns of WiUiam IV and Victoria, when the rapid growth of manufacturing industry, of trade, and of popula- tion, coupled with the influence as well of new ideas in the sphere of government as of advances made in economic and social science, has shaken men loose from many old traditions •I do not include India or the Crown Colonies, because the popula- tion of these is not English.