Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/727

 19. ZANE: THE FIVE AGES 713 witnesses ; but as to all defendants prosecuted for felony the age was content to believe that the government would produce all the witnesses and that the presiding judge would act as counsel for the prisoner. The second was a statute of jeofails proposed by the new Chancellor, Lord Somers. Many of the original provisions of the bill were cut out by amendments, but as it passed it contained some improve- ments. It required a special demurrer to reach errors of form, but the procedure was practically already in that con- dition. It saved the statute of limitations from running in favor of persons absent from the realm. It gave the creditor the right to sue upon the bond given to the sheriff for the release of the debtor. It prohibited the issuance of process in chancery until the filing of the bill. This last requirement merely enacted a chancery rule of Lord Jef- freys. But a really important feature of the new law was that a defendant was given the right to plead to the dec- laration as many pleas as he had defences. Another pro- vision enabled the grantee of land to sue a tenant in posses- sion without proving an attornment. There were other pro- visions of the law, but the foregoing show its general scope. After its passage the energies of reform were exhausted, and all future changes and improvements, until the Ben- thamite agitation, were made by the judges themselves. The new Chief Justice, Sir John Holt, had carefully studied the civil law. He was able to introduce much of the law merchant under the guise of custom. Holt's decisions became a part of the common law, although the form in which the change was made rendered it necessary in many of our States to provide by statute for the rights of the indorsee of negotiable paper. Under other heads of the law, the same judge was able to assist the narrow rules of the common law by the enlightened distinctions of the civil law. In Coggs vs. Bernard ^ the mediaeval law of assumpsit, shown in the opinions of the puisnes, met the civil law in the opinion of Holt, and Bracton was rehabilitated by the Chief Justice as an authority in the English law. The beginnings of a law of agency are apparent in the »Ld. Raym. 909.