Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/695

 19. ZANE: THE FIVE AGES 681 sat on the English throne, found himself ruined and de- throned. The nation which voluntarily abandoned this sys- tem deserved the Yorkist, Tudor, and Stuart tyranny. And every step that since was gained in England was obtained by restoring some principle of this theory of government so boldly sketched by Fortescue. It is a pleasure to know that the manor which the Chief Justice bought and transmitted to his posterity gave a title to his descendants as Viscounts Ebrington, and that the head of the family, as Earl Fortescue, sits in the House of Lords, while three Fortescues since his time have sat as judges in Westminster Hall. Here at this period, when modern history is just begin- ning, when the use of printing was about to multiply books and legal treatises, when the law itself was passing through a great transformation, when the growth of the chancellor's jurisdiction by means of conveyances to uses was to suffer a great expansion, when chancery was to gain its control over common law actions by injunctions, when land was to become again alienable, when the actions of ejectment, of trespass, of trover and of assumpsit were developing and the older actions passing away, when the jury was becoming a body of men which heard evidence only in open court under the control of the judge, when the great advocate with his skill in eliciting evidence and in addressing the jury now first found a place in the practice, and all court proceedings, except formal declarations, were transacted in the English tongue, we have in Fortescue's work a picture of the Eng- lish legal system. But the most interesting portion of his work is the description of the system of legal education at the Inns. The origin of the Inns of Court is lost in antiquity ; but it is practically certain that there was a body of law stu- dents older than any of the Inns. One set of students in Edward II. 's reign, or soon thereafter, obtained quarters in the Temple and soon divided into the Middle and the Inner Temple. Another body of students probably obtained from that ill-starred woman, the heiress of the deLacj^s, the town-house of the Earls of Lincoln, and became Lincoln's