Page:Why the History of English Law is Not Written.djvu/22

13 complete and traditionally consecrated ignorance of French and German law. English lawyers have for the last six centuries exaggerated the uniqueness of our legal history by overrating and antedating the triumphs of Roman law upon the continent I know just enough to say this with confidence, that there are great masses of medieval law very comparable with our own; a little knowledge of them would send us to our Year Books with new vigour and new intelligence.

In the second place it may seem a paradox, but I think is true, that the earlier ages of English law are so little studied because all English lawyers are expected to know something about them. In his first text-bcok the student is solemnly warned that he must know the law as it stood in Edward I.'s day, and unfortunately it is quite impossible to write the simplest book about our land-law without speaking of the De Donis and the Quia Emptores. Well, a stranger might exclaim, what a race of medievalists you English lawyers ought to be! But on enquiry we shall find that the practical necessity for a little knowledge is a positive obstacle to the attainment of more knowledge and also that what is really required of the practising lawyer is not, save in the rarest cases, a knowledge of medieval law as it was in the middle ages, but rather a knowledge of medieval law as interpreted by modern courts to suit modern facts. A lawyer finds on his table a case about rights of common which sends him to the Statute of Merton. But is it really the law of 1236 that he wants to know? No, it is the ultimate result of the interpretations set on the statute by the judges of twenty generations. The more modern the