Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/310

 Chartres produced the Pannoilnia, a similar collection, improved on that of Burchard by the use of the Digest and Code of Justinian. Ivo was a contemporary of Henry I of England, and his date carries us past the Norman Conquest and the Hildebrandine period.

We must revert to the third element of church law, the religious laws of the kings. Of these the history in England is straightforward enough. The Anglo-Saxon sovereigns, acting in the closest union with their bishops, made ecclesiastical laws which clothed the spiritual enactments with coercive authority, and sometimes seemed to ignore the lines which separate the two legislatures; such sacred laws of Alfred, Canute, and Ethelred only affect our subject so far as they operated on the common law of the country in such matters as tithes, observance of holy days, and the like; they do not become by themselves a part of the later church law. On the Continent there is this difference:—the Theodosian code had to a great extent won its way over Western Europe; it enters into the codes of the barbarians, into the law of the Pays du droit écrit, and into the canon law of France; the capitularies of Charles the Great and his successors, even to a greater extent than the Anglo-Saxon laws, combine ecclesiastical with secular dooms; and such of them as are accepted find their way into the Church law. But, over and above this infiltration, comes the necessary requirement of developing jurisprudence. The New Testament, the canons of the General Councils, the Penitentials, the Decretals, did not invent new systems of procedure. Where the Roman courts existed they became the model of the Church courts, and where they did not the ecclesiastical procedure followed the lines of the national and customary tribunals. Hence, wherever the Theodosian code spread, it carried the Roman procedure as a part of church administration; where, as in England, only feint seintillæ of the civil law were to be found, the Church courts must have proceeded on much the same rules as the popular courts. And this is a matter to be seriously noted as we reach the critical point of the Norman Conquest. It is true we know very little about ecclesiastical procedure