Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/66

 52 /. BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST in a popular form; the first Year Book comes from 1292. Between the accession of Henry I. and the death of Henry III., this Court has declared the Common Law of England. That law is to be found, not in custumals, nor in statutes, nor even in text-books ; but in the forms of writs, and in the rolls of the King's Court. It is judiciary law; the men who declared it were judges, not legislators, nor wise men of the shiresT JNo one empowered them to declare law ; HBiutTt will go hard with the men who break the law which they have declared. Still, we have not reached the end of the effects of the Norman Conquest. If the English king had his court at Westminster, the French king had his Parlement at Paris, the German Kaiser his Hofgericht at Mainz or Frankfort, the kings of Leon and Castile their Audiencia Real at Leon or Valladolid. Though the Parlement of Paris and the Impe- rial Hofgericht had infinitely less power in the thirteenth cen- tury than the King's Court in England ; yet the Exchequer Records of Normandy and the Olim or judgement rolls of the Parlement of Paris may be compared with the Plea Rolls of England ; and the Style de du Breuil and the Grant Stille , de la Chancellerie de France may rank beside the Register of Writs, for the work of Breuil at least was regarded as offi- cial.^ But the Norman Conquest had strengthened the posi- '^tion of the Crown in England in more ways than one. Not only was the king of England in the thirteenth century infinitely more powerful within his realm than the king of the English in the tenth ; he was more powerful than the French king in France, far more powerful than the German Kaiser in Germany. Without insisting on the military side of the Norman Conquest, we may notice the fact that the kingship of England was, in the hands of William and his successors, emphatically a " conquest," not a heritage or an elective office. And, when we come to look at the ideas which have gone to make up our notion of property, we shall find that the nouveau acquit, the " conquest," is much more at the dis- posal of its master than the heritage of the office. The Nor- man Duke who acquired England made good use of that
 * VioUet, Pricis de I'Histoire du Droit Frangais, p. 160.