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• Preface
• A Table of British Regnal Years
• Select Essays In Anglo - American Legal History: Volume Ii History of Particular Topics
• Part I.: Sources
• 22.: Heinrich Brunner, the Sources of English Law 1
• 23.: Frederick William Maitland, Materials For the History of English Law 1
• 24.: William Searle Holdsworth, the Year Books 1
• 25.: Van Vechten Veeder, the English Reports, 1537-1865 1
• Appendix A: Edward Jenks, List of Principal Sources of Mediaeval European Law 1
• Supplementary List of References 1
• Appendix B: Paul Samuel Reinsch, a Short Bibliography of American Colonial Law 1
• 26.: The Commissioners, an Historical Survey of Ancient English Statutes 1
• Part II.: The Courts, Their Organization and Jurisdiction
• 27.: Frederick Andrew Inderwick, the Common Law Courts As Established Under Edward I 1
• 28.: George Spence, the History of the Court of Chancery 1
• 29.: William Searle Holdsworth, the Ecclesiastical Courts and Their Jurisdiction 1
• 30.: Thomas Lambert Mears, the History of the Admiralty Jurisdiction 1
• Part III.: Procedure
• 31.: James Bradley Thayer, the Older Modes of Trial 1
• 32.: Sir Frederick Pollock, the King’s Peace In the Middle Ages 1
• 33.: Hubert Hall, the Methods of the Royal Courts of Justice In the Fifteenth Century 1
• 34.: Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Criminal Procedure From the Thirteenth to the Eighteenth Century 1
• 35.: Edward Jenks, the Story of the Habeas Corpus 1
• 36.: Frederick William Maitland, the History of the Register of Original Writs 1
• 37.: Luke Owen Price, an Action At Law In the Reign of Edward III. 1
• 38.: William Searle Holdsworth, the Development of Written and Oral Pleading 1
• 39.: Charles Mcguffey Hepburn, the Historical Development of Code Pleading In America and England 1
• 40.: John Henry Wigmore, a General Survey of the History of the Rules of Evidence 1
• Part IV.: Equity
• 41.: Oliver Wendell Homes, Early English Equity 1
• 42.: Luke Owen Price, Common Law and Conscience In the Ancient Court of Chancery 1
• 43.: James Barr Ames, the Origin of Uses and Trusts 1
• 44.: Christopher Columbus Langdell, the Development of Equity Pleading From Canon Law Procedure 1
• 45.: Solon Dyke Wilson, Courts of Chancery In the American Colonies 1
• 46.: Sidney George Fisher, the Administration of Equity Through Common Law Forms In Pennsylvania. 1

PREFACE

THE first volume of this series seems to have met with the commendation of those for whom it was intended. This, in the opinion of the Editorial Committee, is partly due to the singular symmetry with which the individual essays were found to unite in a mosaic showing the general pattern of our law for the last six centuries. In the present volume, containing the first half of Book II, History of Particular Topics of the Law, that feature can no longer be looked for in such degree; the separate Essays will more usually have, in Coleridge’s phrase, only “the same connection that marbles have in a bag,—they touch without adhering.”

But what may be lost in symmetry is more than made up in concreteness. The solid tangibleness of the ultimate details gives somehow its own peculiar satisfaction. The Essays tell each its separate story of legal history: the varied succession of pictures pleases, like the assembled incidents of daily life depicted by Homer on Achilles’s shield:

• “There he placed two fair cities. . . .
• Here a multitude
• Was in the forum, where a strife went on—
• Two men contending for a fine, the price
• Of one who had been slain. Before the crowd
• One claimed that he had paid the fine, and one
• Denied that aught had been received, and both
• Called for the sentence that should end the strife.”

So through Procedure and Courts to Property and Torts these detailed cameos make up an interesting whole. Some day the missing spaces will be filled in, and the present tracings revised and re-set. Both the small facts and the large features of our last six centuries we shall then know as well at least as the Germans and the French already know their own much more complicated story.

The other contributors to the volume will surely pardon the Committee for specially mentioning its appreciation of the interest shown and the labor done by Professor Heinrich Brunner in re-writing for this Series his essay on the Sources of English Law. May his interest in our legal history stimulate some of us to take a like interest in the origins of that related system for which he has done so much!

No less important and attractive to us, for a later stage in our development, should be the history of Norman and French law, and the researches of the great scholars who labor on it. How much lies there for us, a mere glance at the citations on any page of the lamented leader Maitland will show. Thus far, none of that material has been available for this Series; but it is the hope of the Committee that the third volume will include one representative essay from the French field.

After all, we must recognize that an enlightened cosmopolitanism will be no new thing for us in the legal sphere. Many men from many other lands and systems, in time past, have shared in influencing our law. Bracton drew inspiration from an Italian, and Blackstone from a Frenchman; on Dutch learning Hardwicke and Kent were nourished; an Italian supervised the preparation of Domesday Book, and a Dutchman signed the Bill of Rights; Anglo-Saxon laws have been unearthed by a German, and Bracton’s Note-Book by a Slav; and a Frenchman made Bentham famous. Even the latest achievement of Maitland, which traces back our theory of equitable trusts to an ancient Lombard idea (expounded in a modern German book), was given to the world in an Austrian periodical and is as yet formally unpublished in our own language. The day of the open door in legal learning is upon us.

It remains to repeat that the Lists of References prefixed to each of the Parts in this Book are not put forth as exhaustive, but are intended merely to assemble in convenient form the various materials which the Committee came upon in preparing the selection here reprinted.

The Committee of the
Association of American Law Schools.

Ernst Freund,
University of Chicago.

William E. Mikell,
University of Pennsylvania.

John H. Wigmore,Chairman,
Northwestern University.

March, 1908.