Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/657

 19. ZANE: THE FIVE AGES 643 deserves more than a passing mention. The first Robert de Bruce had come over with the Conqueror and had received ninetj-four lordships as his share of the spoil. A cadet of the house, a grandson of the first Robert, had gone to the court of the Scottish King and had married the heiress of the lordship of Annandale. The fourth Robert in Scotland was Robert the Noble, lord of Annandale, the husband of a daughter of Prince David (the Knight of the Leopard in Scott's Talisman). The fifth Robert, a son of the princess, though a Scotch magnate, was educated for the law at Oxford. He practiced in Westminster Hall. He became Chief Justice and held the office until Henry III.'s death. Edward I. passed him by, and he retired in disgust to Scotland. But when the daugh- ter -of Alexander III. of Scotland died, the heirs to the throne were the descendants of Prince David's daughters. This Robert, the Chief Justice, preferred his claim. He argued his own case before Edward I., the referee, but the decision on good legal grounds was given for John Balliol. But Robert's grandson, another Robert, the national hero of Scotland, made good his title at Bannockburn. Other judges of this reign are interesting figures, — like the Percy, whose family is the one so celebrated in ballad and story as the Percys of Northumberland, or like Gilbert Tal- bot, who married a Welsh princess, and whose descendant was the stout warrior John Talbot, the first of the Earls of Shrewsbury, among whose descendants appeared Lord Chan- cellor Talbot in the reign of George II. But the real lawyer of this reign is the man whom we know as Bracton. His book on the laws and customs of England is the finest pro- duction of the golden age of the common law. Bracton's father was vicar of the church at Bratton, of which Raleigh was the rector. The rector took an interest in the boy. There is a tradition that he put him to school at Oxford. When Raleigh became a judge, he made Bracton a clerk. In due time Bracton was promoted to a justiceship in eyre, when he became in 1245 a serjeant at law. From 1245 to 1265 he traveled the circuit, but part of that period he sat at Westminster with Henry de Bath, Thurkelby and Preston.