Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/322

 the Universities, she begins to have educational machinery for training her lawyers. In this department of work, however, the scientific study has a long- start and advantage over the empirical. The common law has to be learned by practising in the courts, or by attending on their sessions. The apprentices and Serjeants of the Inns of Court learn their work in London; their study is in the year books and the statute book, a valuable and even curiously interesting accumulation of material, but thoroughly insular, or less than that, simply English. The canonists and civilians have also their house in London, the 'Hospitium dominorum advocatorum de arcubus,' but they are scarcely less at home at Rome and Avignon. The canonist and civilian learn the legal language of entire Christendom; the London lawyer sticks to his Norman-French. The Norman-French of Westminster is unintelligible beyond the Channel and beyond the border. Scotland, the sister kingdom, is toiling without a common law system at all until, in the sixteenth century, James V introduces the law of Justinian as her treasury of common law, and thus gains University training and foreign experience for her lawyers: but England has an ancient system and is content with her own superiority; her common law is of native growth, strengthening with the strength of her people; she sees the nations that have accepted the civil law sinking under absolutism; as distinctly as ever 'non vult leges Angliæ mutari.' But she has ceased to banish the skilled jurist. Oxford and Cambridge have their schools of both the faculties. The civil law at Oxford had its schools from the fourteenth century in Cat Street, on the north of S. Mary's, in Schidyard Street, and in the great civil law school in S. Edward's parish where Archbishop Warham learned law. The canon law school was in the neighbourhood of S. Edward's church also, and was rebuilt in 1489 by subscription of the canonists. Wood enumerates no less than seven distinct sets of Scholæ Legum, the majority being for civil law. In the colleges legal study has its proper endowments. At Merton the study of the canon law is by the founder's statutes permitted to four or five of his scholars, that of the civil law is allowed to the canonists as subsidiary