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18 vogue all over the wet of Europe, where before it was quite laid aide and in a manner forgotten; though ome traces of it’s authority remained in Italy and the eatern provinces of the empire. This now became in a particular manner the favourite of the popih clergy, who borrowed the method and many of the maxims of their canon law from this original. The tudy of it was introduced into everal univerities abroad, particularly that of Bologna; where exercies were performed, lectures read, and degrees conferred in this faculty, as in other branches of cience: and many nations on the continent, jut then beginning to recover from the convulions conequent upon the overthrow of the Roman empire, and ettling by degrees into peaceable forms of government, adopted the civil law, (being the bet written ytem then extant) as the bais of their everal contitutions; blending and interweaving it among their own feodal cutoms, in ome places with a more extenive, in others a more confined authority.

was it long before the prevailing mode of the times reached England. For Theobald, a Norman abbot, being elected to the ee of Canterbury, and extremely addicted to this new tudy, brought over with him in his retinue many learned proficients therein; and among the ret Roger irnamed Vacarius, whom he placed in the univerity of Oxford , to teach it to the people of this country. But it did not meet with the ame eay reception in England, where a mild and rational ytem of laws had been long etablihed, as it did upon the continent; and, though the monkih clergy (devoted to the will of a foreign primate) received it with eagernes and zeal, yet the laity who were more intereted to preerve the old contitution, and had already everely felt the effect of many Norman innovations, continued wedded to the ue of the common law. King Stephen imme- diately