Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/424

 410 ///. THE COLONIAL PERIOD popularly elected magistrates who had no pretensions to a knowledge of technical jurisprudence. Stokes also discusses the question as to what part of the English common law the colonists had brought along with them.^ His answer illustrates the vagueness and the unhis- torical character of the legal theory. He says that the gen- eral rules of inheritance and personal injuries were brought along ; not, however, the artificial distinctions and refinements of property law, the laws of police and revenue, etc. Now we have seen that the law of personal injuries was usually fixed by the codes which the colonists established at an early date, the rule of inheritance too was in most colonies varied from that of the common law; and certainly an adoption of any system which would leave out property law could be styled an adoption only in a very modified sense of the term. IV. CONCLUSION When we come to consider from a more general point of view the attitude of the early settlers toward the common law, we find that certain views of law pervaded all the colonies ; that in other matters the various colonies followed their own bent and were influenced by their special conditions or the special purposes of their polities. A general trait of early colonial law is codification. It seems to have been universally considered necessary to state the essential elements of law for the guidance of the colonists who had taken up their abode in a wilderness without books or facilities for legal study, who therefore in the nature of things could not use a system which, like the common law even of that date, necessitated a vast apparatus of technical treatises, of reports, and of stat- ute books. In all the colonies except Maryland we find an early codification of the essential elements of the law. In Maryland, as we have seen, this was prevented by the con- troversy between the people and the proprietor, but even there considerable legislation was produced at an early date. Some of the codes, like those of Massachusetts and Penn-
 * Stokes, View of the Constitution of the British Colonies, pp. 9, 10.