Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/662

 648 V. BENCH AND BAR any large portion of the nation. The palladium of our liberties, that jury which grew out of the royal inquisition, was wholly foreign to the English race, and was imposed upon the nation by the Norman and Angevin kings. The grand jury in its inception was to most of the people little better than an engine of royal oppression. The Norman baronage represents the element of power among the makers of this jurisprudence. In spite of indi- vidual exceptions who were cruel and oppressive, the mass of the Normans insisted upon law and order. They demanded men learned in the law for judges, and insisted that the judges should be independent of royal dictation. They asked for their own rights, but in Magna Charta insisted upon the rights of their humblest followers. In the years when the baronage was fighting John or Henry III., when civil war was distracting the land, practically the same judges went on holding court at Westminster, uninfluenced by the varying fortunes of barons or of king. Many a tale has been told to the discredit of the Normans; the jius primae noctis superstition is still an article of faith. But the legal historian knows that English liberty and law, even representative government, was the work of the Norman. William, Earl of Pembroke, well answered the king in the spirit of the Norman lawyer : " Nor would it be for the king's honor that I should submit to his will against reason, whereby I should rather do wrong to him and to that justice, which he is bound to administer towards his people; and I should give an ill example to all men in deserting justice and right in compliance with his mistaken will. For this would show that I loved my worldly wealth better than jus- tice." It was not until the Norman baronage was broken by the wars of the Roses that England was ready to submit to the tyranny of the Yorkist and Tudor sovereigns — a tyranny that found its support in the mass of the nation. And when the struggle was resumed against the Stuart kings, the words of Bracton and of William of Pembroke were eagerly cited to prove that the king himself was not above the law of the land.