Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/364

 350 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S The days of the Reformation bring two new and powerful influences to bear upon laws and institutions. One of these influences is economic, the other religious. The growth of industry and trade had so far disintegrated the old structure of society and brought about new conditions that not a few new laws, among which the most familiar and significant are the Statute of Uses and the Statute of Wills, were now needed. The nation was passing out of the stiff'ness of a society based on landholding and recognizing serfdom into a larger and freer life. At the same time the religious revolu- tion which severed it from Rome, which was accompanied by the dissolution of the monasteries, and which ended by secur- ing the ascendency of a new body of theological ideas and of simpler forms of worship, involved many legal changes. The ecclesiastical courts were shorn of most of their powers, and the law they administered was cut off from the influences that had theretofore moulded and dominated it. The position of the clergy was altered. New provisions for the poor soon began to be called for. New tendencies, the result of a bolder spirit of inquiry, made themselves felt in legislation. One sees them stirring in the mind of Sir Thomas More. It was some time before the religious and economic changes took their full eff^ect upon the law. But nearly all the remarkable develop- ments that make the time of Henry VIII and Elizabeth an epoch of legal change, may be traced not so much to politics as to the joint influence of commerce (including the growth of personal, as distinguished from real, property) and of theology. Even the oceanic power and territorial expansion of England, which began with the voyages of Drake and the foundation of the Virginia Company and of the East India Company, did not affect either the law or the institutions of the country. The establishment of distant settlements was largely the result of the growing force of commercial enterprise, in which there was at first very little of political ambition, though it cordially lent itself to a political antag- onism first to Spain and then to France. With the time of the Great Civil War we return to an era in which, though religion and commerce continue to be potent forces, the first place must again be assigned to political