Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/652

 638 V. BENCH AND BAR tions is probably the real reason why the Roman law exerted so little influence upon the common law or its procedure. At Oxford there was a school of the civil and the canon law. Ecclesiastics educated under that system were constantly filling high judicial positions, yet these men were all faithful to the king's courts and hostile to the ecclesiastical pro- cedure. Practically all the trained lawyers were priests, yet they uniformly upheld the English law. In after times the canon law was to mold the procedure in the chancery courts; but the secular courts were not affected. No doubt the rational conceptions learned by these ecclesiastical law- yers from the civil law had no little effect upon the substance of their decisions; but the Roman law never affected the secular courts' procedure. An interesting figure among clerical judges is that noted Abbot Samson of St. Edmund's Bury, who was made one of Henry II.'s justices. The priestly chronicler records with pride that a rich suitor cursed a court where neither gold nor silver could confound an adversary. The same chronicler tells us that Osbert Fitz-Hervey, a serjeant at law, the ancestor of the Marquises of Bristol, who was twenty- five years a judge at Westminster, said: "That abbot is a shrewd fellow; if he goes on as he begins, he will cut out every lawyer of us." In a case where the Abbot was a party, Jocelyn says that five of the assize (jury) came to the Abbot to learn how they should decide, meaning to re- ceive money, but the Abbot would promise them nothing, and told them to decide according to their consciences. So they went away in great wrath and found a verdict against the abbey. The juror who regards his place as an opportu- nity for pecuniary profit seems to be as old as the common law. The intractability of the academic theorist in the person of Walter Map, the celebrated writer, crops out in his judicial experience. He once went the circuit, but was not called upon the second time, since he insisted on excepting from his oath to do justice to all men, " Jews and white monks," both of which classes he detested. So he went back to his more congenial work of denouncing the whole body