Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/67

 ^. JENKS: TEUTONIC LAW 53 idea. He maintained an elaborate pretence of heirship to Edward the Confessor; but all men must have seen that it was a solemn farce. As Duke of Normandy, he owed at least nominal allegiance to the King of the French; as king of England he was " absolute." All was his to give away ; what he had not expressly given away, belonged without question to him. Among the documents of the Anglo-Norman period, the charter plays a prominent part; and a learned jurist has explained that the essential feature of a charter is that it is a " dispositive " document, a document which transfers to B some right or interest which at present belongs to A.^ So we get the long and important series of English charters, which culminates in the Great Charter of John and the Merchant Charter of Edward I. When the English Justinian is making his great enquiry into the franchises ' which his barons claim to exercise, he insists, and nearly suc- ceeds in maintaining, that, for every assertion of seigneurial privilege, the claimant shall show a royal charter.^ It would have been absurd for Philip the Fair or Rudolf of Habs- burg to make such a demand; for their feudatories held franchises by older titles than their own, unless indeed the German Kaiser had founded himself on the authority of^ Charles the Great. The Charter is not a peculiarly English institution; the town charters of Germany and France go back at least to the twelfth century.^ But the charter as a monument of general law is peculiar to, or at least specially characteristic of England ; and it is one of the many signs that the English monarchy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the most powerful and centralized monarchy of the Teutonic world. England was a royal domain. But the lord of a domain may make rules for its manage- ment, at least with the concurrence of his managing officials. If any precedent were required for this assertion, we have it in the Capitulare de Villis of Charles the Great. But it is Urkunde, p. 211. ' Stobbe, Geschichte der deutschen RechtsqueUen, Pt. T. p. 485. Esmein, Histoire du Droit Franqais, 2nd. ed., p. 312. It is noteworthy that one of the oldest and most important of French town-charters, the so-called Etablissemens de Rouen, was granted by an English king.
 * Brunner, zur Rechtsgeschichte der romischen und germanischen
 * Pollock and Maitland, History, vol. i. p. 559.