Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 23.pdf/378

346 to the lives of judges can also be done with regard to the lives of the great authors in the law. At the end of nine hundred years but six names stand out like towering peaks—but six names in English law stand there as beacon lights and guides to succeeding generations: Glanville, Bracton, Littleton, Coke, Hale and Blackstone. Take Glanville, the Chief justice of Henry the Second, the greatest English king upon the throne for a period of at least three hundred years: Glanville, the author of the ﬁrst systematic treatise upon the law of England. The sort of fellow he was, the material of his biography, you will ﬁnd in the preface of the eighth volume of Coke's reports. Then you can trace it out from there to earlier works. A man starting originally as sheriff in the County of York, on the northern border, when the king was on crusade, acting really as Vice-Regent of the realm, of such military capacity that he organized a military force and surprised the Scottish King, William the Lion, and made prisoner of him; a man who afterwards became so ﬁred with holy zeal that, at the age of seventy, he went on the crusade and died at the foot of the walls of Acre, in the presence of Richard Cœur de Lion-and yet the author of the ﬁrst systematic treatise of the English law. You open the book and look at it. You say it is not a philosophical discourse. It is a book of practice, but, strange to say, the very language of the writs by which suitors were summoned to appear before the King wherever the King happened to be in the kingdom, was couched precisely in the same terms that we have today in our ordinary writs of summons—and even of execution. We ﬁnd much space devoted to the doctrine of essoigns, we ﬁnd that the excuses for non-appearance were that the defendant was be

yond the seas, or that he was in the crusade, or with the army, or that a freshet had broken down a bridge and that he could not reach Winchester in time, or that he lay sick on the road, and then to guard against malingering a special commission was issued to investigate into the truth of the excuse. We associate this ﬁrst great treatise with the period of the crusade ﬁfty years before the passage of Magna Carta. It is not difficult to remember that the six great names I have mentioned are more or less closely associated with events of importance to American history, Glanville writing about ﬁfty years before the great statute of Magna Carta. Bracton writing about ﬁfty years after the statute of Magna Carta, the principles of which lie at the basis of our constitutions, both federal and state. Bracton for ﬁve hundred years dominated the profession, one of the justices itinerary of Henry III, traveling over the kingdom of England in order to take the part of the King, who had at that time delegated the personal duty of sitting in his Court to his Chief Justice. The work of Bracton is the most beautiful treatise, scientiﬁcally and in point of expression, that existed in the law prior to the time of Blackstone. Neither Coke nor Hale can compete with it in style. There is a reference in Bracton to what a good judge should be, to what exalted justice should be, that deserves to be quoted on the notes in full. I won't attempt to give it from memory. I will write it because it will give you an idea not only of the loftiness of the man's mind, the extent of his grasp upon the breadth and sublimity of jurisprudence, but also his exalted notions of the function of the judge.1

1Let not one, who is unwise and unlearned, ascend the judgment seat, which is, as it were. the throne of God, lest he convert darkness into light and light into darkness, and lest with a sword in