Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/644

 630 V. BENCH AND BAR Sir Thomas More was being inducted as chancellor under Henry VIII., he stopped in his progress to the marble chair and knelt to receive a blessing from his father, a judge sit- ting in the Common Pleas. There is but one other building in the world that offers such a flood of legal memories. The old Palais de Justice in Paris has been the scene of many a great legal controversy, but Westminster Hall has listened to the judgments of PateshuU and Raleigh and Hengham. Here Gascoigne, Fortescue, Brian, Littleton, Dyer, Coke and Bacon sat. Here Hale and Nottingham, Hardwicke and Mansfield did their work for jurisprudence. The great fo- rensic contests of England, the arguments in the case of Ship-Money, the trial of the Seven Bishops, Erskine's perfect oratory in Hardy's case, and Brougham in the Queen's case, are among the memories that make this solid Norman edifice to lawyers the most interesting spot in England. In the reign of Henry I., a man splendidly educated for that time, surnamed Beauclerk, the Scholar, we begin to see the growing interest in the law. Wearied of the oppressions of the Conqueror and Rufus, men looked back to the good old times of the Saxon. The King had married a princess of the Saxon royal house. Himself a usurper he looked to his Saxon subjects for support. They won for Stephen the Battle of the Standard against the Scotch, celebrated by Cedric in Ivanhoe. In the Saxon enthusiasm a large crop of Saxon laws appeared, some of them actual translations from old laws, some of them palpable forgeries. The King even promised to restore the old local courts of the Saxons; had he done so, we should have had no common law. It was by this time apparent that the king's court was supplanting the old tribunals. The great lawsuits, being among the magnates, necessarily came before the king's courts. That court was stronger than any other, and suitors instinctively would turn to it. The criminal jurisdiction of the king's court was growing. Its jurisdiction was extended to suitors in civil causes first as a matter of favor. The bishop had been taken out of the county court and given a separate jurisdiction in ecclesiastical matters, among which were numbered the ad- ministration of estates of decedents and matters of marriage