Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/363

 10. BRYCE: ROME AND ENGLAND 349 The development of English institutions has been at all times so slow and so comparatively steady that it is not easy to fix upon particular epochs as those most conspicuously marked by change. However I take the epoch of Edward I and Edward III. Under Edward I, whose reign was one of comparative domestic tranquillity, the organ of government whose supreme legislative authority was to become unques- tioned took its final shape in passing from a Great Council of magnates to an Assembly consisting of two Houses, in one of which the chief tenants of the Crown sat, while the other was composed of representatives of the minor tenants and of boroughs. Under his grandson the chief judicial Minister of the Crown began to sit as a Court, granting redress in the name of the Crown in cases or by methods which the pre- existing Courts were unable or unwilling to deal with. Par- liament passed under Edward I some statutes of the first magnitude, such as Quia Emptores and De Donis Condltio- nalibus, which impressed a peculiar character on the English land system, and introduced some valuable improvements in the sphere of private rights and remedies. But the legisla- ture was, for two or three centuries, in the main content to leave the building up of the law to the old Common Law Courts and (in later days) to the Chancellor. The action of this last-named officer was, during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of capital importance, so that the establishment of his jurisdiction is one of the landmarks of our legal history. It was really a renewal, two hundred years after Henry II's time, of that king's efforts to secure the due administration of justice through the realm, but it grew up naturally and spontaneously, with less of conscious purpose than Henry II had shown. Both the legislature and the Chancellor were the outcome of political causes, but it must not be forgotten that in the methods taken by the Chanc(>llor (hardly reduced to a system till the seventeenth century) we find the working of a foreign influence which thereafter dis- appears from English law, that, namely, of the civil and canon laws of Rome and of the Roman Church, for the Chan- cellors of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were all ecclesiastics and drew largely from Roman sources.