Page:Why the History of English Law is Not Written.djvu/12



I am speaking for the first time in a new character, though I have before me the difficult task of trying to fill the place of one who was honoured by all who knew him and loved by all who knew him well, I yet have not the disadvantage—or should I say advantage?—of coming as a stranger to the Cambridge Law School. At any rate I mean to excuse myself on this occasion from any survey of the whole of the vast subject that has been committed to my care; rather I will make a few remarks about one particular branch of study, a branch that is very interesting to me, though I hope that I shall never overrate its importance. And if I have to say that it is not flourishing quite as it ought to flourish, believe me that this is said very modestly.

Our patience of centennial celebrations has been somewhat severely tasked this year, nevertheless it may be allowed me to remind you that next year will see the seven-hundredth birthday of English legal memory. The doctrine that our memory goes back to the coronation of Richard I. and no further is of course a highly technical doctrine, the outcome of a statute of limitation, capricious as all such statutes must be; still in a certain sense it is curiously true. If we must fix a date at which English law becomes