Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/362

 348 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S against the disintegrating tendencies of feudalism, but also against the pretensions of the churchmen, who claimed exemp- tion from his jurisdiction, and maintained courts which were in some directions formidg^ble rivals to his own. He prevailed in both contests, though it was not till long after that the victory was seen to have remained with the Crown. It was his fortune to live at a time when the study of law, revived in the schools of Italy, had made its way to England, where it was pursued with a zeal which soon told upon the practice of the Courts, sharpening men's wits and providing for them an arsenal of legal weapons. It is true, that the law taught at the Universities was the Roman law, and that the practi- tioners were almost entirely ecclesiastics. Now the barons, however jealous they might be of the Crown, were not less jealous of ecclesiastical encroachments and of the imperial law. They could not prevent judges from drawing on the treasures which the jurists of ancient Rome had accumulated, but they did prevent the Roman law from becoming recog- nized as authoritative; so that whatever it contributed to the law of England came in an English guise, and served rather to supplement than to supersede the old customs of the kingdom. In this memorable epoch, which stamped upon the common law of England a character it has never lost, the impulse which the work of law-making received came primarily from the political circumstances of the time, that is, from the desire of the king to make his power as the receiver of taxes and the fountain of justice effective through his judges, and from the sense In all classes that the constant activity of the Courts in reducing the tangle of customs to order, no less than the occasional activity of the king when he enacted with the advice and consent of his Great Council statutes such as the Constitutions of Clai;pndon, was a beneficial activity, wholesome to the nation. But though political causes were the main forces at work, much must also be allowed to the influence of ideas, and particularly .to the intellectual stimulus and the legal training which the study of Roman jurisprudence had given to the educated men who surrounded and worked for the king and the bishops.