Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/71

 2. JENKS: TEUTONIC LAW 57 find. We may suspect it to He in the clerkly qualities of the French court officials. We know that some at least of the French courts kept careful records, and used the regular forms ; the German Weisthumer and the German form-books, the decisions of the Court at Ingelheim and the Oordelboek of Drenthe, the Summa prosarum dictaminis and the Summa , curice regis, seem to have been poor by comparison. At a certain stage of its history, the life of an institution depends on its using stereotyped forms. So the text-books of Eike von Repgowe and others came to be accepted in Germany as Law, although men must have known them to be the work of private jurists. Documents of the fifteenth century quote the Suabian Mirror (under its later name of Kaiserrecht) as a textual authority ; ^ and all kinds of legends grow up, which attribute the authorship of the Saxon Mirror to ki^g^ and emperors.^ On the other hand, the French mind clung to the idea that the text-books were not themselves Law ; and, in the fifteenth century, we find a most interesting process going on. The uncertainty and obscurity of the local customs had at last aroused the hostility of the kings who were building up a great centralizing monarchy in France; and, though they did not venture to alter those local customs which were so fatal an obstacle to their policy, they determined that at least they should be known and recorded. Perhaps they had a presentiment that greater things might happen as a result of the step. Perhaps they thought that a custom once for- mulated might be altered ; at least there would be something to attack. Perhaps they dreamed of a unified France, living under one law. If so, they must have had a rude awakening. For when, as the results of the labours of Charles VII., Louis XL, Charles VIIL, and Louis XII., the official Coutumiers are finally before the world, it is a startling picture that they reveal to us. Each district lives under its own law, and is judged by its feudal seigneurs. Not merely great feudal Urkunden zur Geschichte des deutschen Privatrechtes, ed, 2, Part I. No. 339.
 * See, for example, the document given in Loersch and Schroder,
 * Stobbe, op. cit., p. 318.