Page:Why the History of English Law is Not Written.djvu/19

10 he was learned, very learned in law of all sorts and kinds. It is only through learning wide and deep, tough and technical, that we can safely approach those world-wide questions that he raised or criticize the answers that he found for them. What is got more cheaply will be guess-work or a merely curious collection of odds and ends, of precarious odds and questionable ends.

And now why is our history unwritten? In the first place, I think we may say, because of the traditional isolation of the study of English law from every other study, an isolation which is illustrated by the fact that it is only of late years, late years to us who have been dealing in centuries, that English law has had a home in the Universities. In 1850 when my predecessor Professor Amos came to the chair, the class of English law in this University consisted of one M.A., one B.A. and two undergraduates. At another time it may be interesting to account for this, to observe the formation of law schools in London while the Universities are teaching to ever fewer students a kind of law, Roman and Canon Law, which is not the law of the King s Courts, and becomes of ever less and less importance to the bulk of Englishmen. This process had momentous results and, all things considered, we cannot regret them. If the Universities had taught English law, English law would sooner or later have ceased to be English, But as it was, the education of the English lawyer—I speak of the later middle ages and of the Tudor time—was not academic; it was scholastic. It would be a great mistake to suppose that the lawyers of that age