Page:William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (3rd ed, 1768, vol I).djvu/35

§. 1. diately publihed a proclamation, forbidding the tudy of the laws, then newly imported from Italy; which was treated by the monks as a piece of impiety, and, though it might prevent the introduction of the civil law proces into our courts of jutice, yet did not hinder the clergy from reading and teaching it in their own chools and monateries.

this time the nation eems to have been divided into two parties; the bihops and clergy, many of them foreigners, who applied themelves wholly to the tudy of the civil and canon laws, which now came to be ineparably interwoven with each other; and the nobility and laity, who adhered with equal pertinacity to the old common law; both of them reciprocally jealous of what they were unacquainted with, and neither of them perhaps allowing the oppoite ytem that real merit which is abundantly to be found in each. This appears on the one hand from the pleen with which the monatic writers peak of our municipal laws upon all occaions; and, on the other, from the firm temper which the nobility hewed at the famous parliament of Merton; when the prelates endeavoured to procure an act, to declare all batards legitimate in cae the parents intermarried at any time afterwards; alleging this only reaon, becaue holy church (that is, the canon law) declared uch children legitimate: but “all the earls and barons (ays the parliament roll ) with one voice anwered, that they would not change the laws of England, which had hitherto been ued and approved.” And we find the ame jealouy prevailing above a century afterwards, when the nobility declared with a kind of prophetic pirit, “that the realm of England hath never been unto this hour, neither by the conent of our lord the king and the lords of parliament hall it ever be, ruled or governed by the civil Rh