Imatges de pàgina
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CHAP. and promptings of disposition, than the inventions of legislators. The consequence of this is, that we remark and treasure a thousand little sentiments and emotions, which the ancients deemed below or foreign to their consideration; and our characters, cherished by the warmth of a less artificial mode of society, unfold a variety of minuter lineaments and features, which under other circumstances in man have been blighted and destroyed. The feudal system was the nurse of chivalry, and the parent of romance; and out of these have sprung the principle of modern honour in the best sense of that term, the generosity of disinterested adventure, and the more persevering and successful cultivation of the private affections.

4. English constitu

The three modes of law which have just tion. been mentioned, were already, in the four

teenth century, in some measure a tale of other times, and led the student back to the page of history, and the manners of preceding generations. There was a fourth mode which was yet in its infancy, that had all the graces of novelty, and allured the enquirer

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by the attractions of a prophetic curiosity. CHAP. This was in the time of Chaucer the system

of several of the most favoured countries of Europe; but has now become by way of distinction the English constitution. It originated in the growth of commerce and of cities, which gave to the plebeian engaged in merchandise an importance that could no longer be neglected in a public and liberal system of government. Contemporary, or nearly so, with the rise of the burgesses, or inhabitants of towns, was that of the yeomanry, better understood in Chaucer's time by the appellation of franklins, or little freeFrom these two classes, the burgesses in the towns, and the rural freemen, or small holders of land, was composed the third estate, comprising in every civilised country, the most valuable and numerous branch of the community. Whatever may be decided respecting the abstract value of such a constitution, consisting of clergy, temporal lords and commoners, it was a mighty acquisition to the cause of human nature at the period

men.

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CHAP. when it was introduced, and must have been regarded with all the fondness of affection and hope by a liberal mind in the fourteenth century.

Early writ

ers on

law.

The English constitution in its most essential features was the produce of the thirteenth century, and went on in a continual train of improvement during the whole remaining dynasty of the Plantagenets. The progress of political institution, as well as of literature, was fatally interrupted by the wars of York and Lancaster; and a system of despotism, though of a less malignant aspect than that introduced in France and other countries, was established by the usurping Tudor, and perpetuated through the whole of the sixteenth century.

The books in which Chaucer may be supEnglish posed to have studied the laws of his country are various, and have most of them descended to our own time. The laws of our early kings, as William the Conqueror and Henry I, have been digested into a sort of system, having annexed to them the names of the princes

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to whose reigns they belong. A similar col- CHAP. lection was made in the reign of Henry II, which bears the name of Ranulph de Glanville, chief-justiciary in the latter part of that reign, and is regarded as the first performance which has in any degree the air of a general treatise on jurisprudence, written after the dissolution of the Roman empire. The charters of our kings, limiting the prerogative, and defining the feudal and other rights of the subject, from Henry I. to the memorable epoch of Magna Charta, were also familiar to the recollection, and dear to the hearts, of the ancient English. At length an able, copious, and comparatively elegant writer on English law, rose toward the end of the reign of Henry III, in the person of Henry de Bracton, whose work was received as the most authentic system and compendium on the subject, down to the time of chief justice Coke in the reign of James I. Several other

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They are published in Wilkins's collection of Lrges Saxonica, &c,

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CHAP treatises formed a valuable supplement to that of Bracton; particularly Fleta, a sort of appendix to this author; and Britton (perhaps merely a diversity in writing the name of this venerable lawyer), an abridgment of Bracton's treatise, drawn up in the French language: both these works were the offspring of the period of Edward I. The Mirroir des Justices has been ascribed by some of our antiquaries to the time of the Saxons; but, at least in the form in which we possess it, has internal marks of a much later date, and probably belongs to the reign of Edward II: it bears the name of Andrew Horne. These different works were sufficient to give to the student an idea of the institutions of his country; and to familiarise to his conceptions that regularity of proceeding, and those maxims of jurisprudence, which, in every state, are necessary, to give confidence to the subject, and to maintain in the human mind a certain sentiment of independence and dignity.

Modes of

A feature essential to the history of law, as pleading. it was known and practised in these times,

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