The Online Library of Liberty

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• Commentaries On the Laws of England.
• Book the Third.: of Private Wrongs.
• Chapter I.: Of the Redress of Private Wrongs By the Mere Act of the Parties.
• Chapter II.: Of Redress By the Mere Operation of Law.
• Chapter III.: Of Courts In General.
• Chapter IV.: Of the Public Courts of Common Law and Fquity.
• * [*61 Chapter V.: Of Courts Ecclesiastical, Military, and Maritime.
• Chapter VI.: Of Courts of a Special Jurisdiction.
• Chapter VII.: Of the Cognizance of Private Wrongs.
• Chapter VIII.: Of Wrongs, and Their Remedies, Respecting the Rights of Persons.
• Chapter IX.: Of Injuries to Personal Property.
• Chapter X.: Of Injuries to Real Property; and First of Dispossession, Or Ouster of the Freehold.
• Chapter XI.: Of Dispossession, Or Ouster, of Chattels Real.
• Chapter XII.: Of Trespass.
• Chapter XIII.: Of Nuisance.
• Chapter XIV.: Of Waste.
• Chapter XV.: Of Subtraction.
• Chapter XVI.: Of Disturbance.
• Chapter XVII.: Of Injuries Proceeding From, Or Affecting, the Crown.
• Chapter XVIII.: Of the Pursuit of Remedies By Action; and First of the Original Writ.
• Chapter XIX.: Of Process.
• Chapter XX.: Of Pleading
• Chapter XXI.: Of Issue and Demurrer.
• Chapter XXII.: Of the Several Species of Trial.
• Chapter XXIII.: Of the Trial By Jury.
• Chapter XXIV.: Of Judgment and Its Incidents.
• Chapter XXV.: Of Proceedings In the Nature of Appeals.
• Chapter XXVI.: Of Execution.
• Chapter XXVII.: Of Proceedings In the Courts of Equity.
• Appendix.
• No. I.: Proceedings On a Writ of Right Patent.
• * *vii.] No. II.: Proceedings On an Action of Trespass In Ejectment, By Original, In the King’s Bench.
• * [*xiii. No. III.: Proceedings On an Action of Debt In the Court of Common Pleas; Removed Into the King’s Bench By Writ of Error.
• Book the Fourth.: of Public Wrongs.
• Chapter I.: Of the Nature of Crimes, and Their Punishment.
• Chapter II.: Of the Persons Capable of Committing Crimes.
• Chapter III.: Of Principals and Accessories.
• Chapter IV.: Of Offences Against God and Religion.
• * [*66 Chapter V.: Of Offences Against the Law of Nations.
• Chapter VI.: Of High Treason.
• Chapter VII.: Of Felonies Injurious to the King’s Prerogative.
• Chapter VIII.: Of PrÆmunire.
• Chapter IX.: Of Misprisions and Contempts Affecting the King and Government.
• Chapter X.: Of Offences Against Public Justice.
• Chapter XI.: Of Offences Against the Public Peace.
• Chapter XII.: Of Offences Against Public Trade.
• Chapter XIII.: Of Offences Against the Public Health, and the Public Police Or Economy.
• Chapter XIV.: Of Homicide.
• Chapter XV.: Of Offences Against the Persons of Individuals.
• Chapter XVI.: Of Offences Against the Habitations of Individuals.
• Chapter XVII.: Of Offences Against Private Property.
• Chapter XVIII.: Of the Means of Preventing Offences.
• Chapter XIX.: Of Courts of a Criminal Jurisdiction.
• Chapter XX.: Of Summary Convictions.
• Chapter XXI.: Of Arrests.
• Chapter XXII.: Of Commitment and Bail.
• Chapter XXIII.: Of the Several Modes of Prosecution.
• Chapter XXIV.: Of Process Upon an Indictment.
• Chapter XXV.: Of Arraignment and Its Incidents.
• Chapter XXVI.: Of Plea, and Issue.
• Chapter XXVII.: Of Trial and Conviction.
• Chapter XXVIII.: Of the Benefit of Clergy.
• Chapter XXIX.: Of Judgment and Its Consequences.
• Chapter XXX.: Of Reversal of Judgment.
• Chapter XXXI.: Of Reprieve and Pardon.
• Chapter XXXII.: Of Execution.
• Chapter XXXIII.: Of the Rise, Progress, and Gradual Improvements of the Laws of England.
• Appendix.
• Sect. 1.: Record of an Indictment and Conviction of Murder, At the Assizes.
• Sect. 2.: Conviction of Manslaughter.
• Sect. 3.: Entry of a Trial Instanter In the Court of King’s Bench, Upon a Collateral Issue; and Rule of Court For Execution Thereon.
• Sect. 4.: Warrant of Execution On Judgment of Death, At the General Gaol-delivery In London and Middlesex.
• Sect. 5.: Writ of Execution Upon a Judgment of Murder, Before the King In Parliament.
• Barron Field, an Analysis of Blackstone’s Commentaries On the Laws of England.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

OF THE RISE, PROGRESS, AND GRADUAL IMPROVEMENTS OF THE LAWS OF ENGLAND.

*[*407Before we enter on the subject of this chapter, in which I propose, by way of supplement to the whole, to attempt an historical review of the most remarkable changes and alterations that have happened in the laws of England, I must first of all remind the student that the rise and progress of many principal points and doctrines have been already pointed out in the course of these commentaries under their respective divisions; these having therefore been particularly discussed already, it cannot be expected that I should reexamine them with any degree of minuteness, which would be a most tedious undertaking. What I therefore at present propose is, only to mark out some outlines of our English juridical history, by taking a chronological view of the state of our laws and their successive mutations at different periods of time.

The several periods under which I shall consider the state of our legal polity are the following six: 1. From the earliest times to the Norman conquest; 2. From the Norman conquest to the reign of king Edward the First; 3. From thence to the reformation; 4. From the reformation to the *[*408restoration of king Charles the Second; 5. From thence to the revolution in 1688; 6. From the revolution to the present time.

I. And, first, with regard to the antient Britons, the aborigines of our island, we have so little handed down to us concerning them with any tolerable certainty that our inquiries here must needs be very fruitless and defective. However, from Cæsar’s account of the tenets and discipline of the antient Druids in Gaul, in whom centred all the learning of these western parts, and who were, as he tells us, sent over to Britain (that is, to the island of Mona or Anglesey) to be instructed; we may collect a few points which bear a great affinity and resemblance to some of the modern doctrines of our English law. Particularly the very notion itself of an oral, unwritten law, delivered down from age to age by custom and tradition merely, seems derived from the practice of the Druids, who never committed any of their instructions to writing, possibly for want of letters; since it is remarkable that in all the antiquities, unquestionably British, which the industry of the moderns has discovered, there is not in any of them the least trace of any character or letter to be found. The partible quality also of lands by the custom of gavelkind, which still obtains in many parts of England, and did universally over Wales till the reign of Henry VIII., is undoubtedly of British original. So likewise is the antient division of the goods of an intestate between his widow and children or next of kin; which has since been revived by the statute of distributions. And we may also remember an instance of a slighter nature mentioned in the present volume, where the same custom has continued from Cæsar’s time to the present; that of burning a woman guilty of the crime of petit treason by killing her husband.1

The great variety of nations that successively broke in upon and destroyed both the British inhabitants and *[*409constitution, the Romans, the Picts, and after them the various clans of Saxons and Danes, must necessarily have caused great confusion and uncertainty in the laws and antiquities of the kingdom; as they were very soon incorporated and blended together, and therefore, we may suppose, mutually communicated to each other their respective usages,(a) in regard to the rights of property and the punishment of crimes. So that it is morally impossible to trace out with any degree of accuracy when the several mutations of the common law were made, or what was the respective original of those several customs we at present use, by any chemical resolution of them to their first and component principles. We can seldom pronounce that this custom was derived from the Britons; that was left behind by the Romans; this was a necessary precaution against the Picts; that was introduced by the Saxons, discontinued by the Danes, but afterwards restored by the Normans.

Wherever this can be done, it is matter of great curiosity and some use; but this can very rarely be the case, not only from the reason above mentioned, but also from many others. First, from the nature of traditional laws in general, which, being accommodated to the exigencies of the times, suffer by degrees insensible variations in practice;(b) so that though upon comparison we plainly discern the alteration of the law from what it was five hundred years ago, yet it is impossible to define the precise period in which that alteration accrued, any more than we can discern the changes of the bed of a river which varies its shores by continual decreases and alluvions. Secondly, this becomes impracticable from the antiquity of the kingdom and its government, which alone, though it had been disturbed by no foreign invasions, would make it impossible to search out the original of its laws, unless we had as authentic monuments thereof as the Jews had by the hand of Moses.(c) Thirdly, **410]this uncertainty of the true origin of particular customs must also in part have arisen from the means whereby Christianity was propagated among our Saxon ancestors in this island, by learned foreigners brought over from Rome and other countries, who undoubtedly carried with them many of their own national customs, and probably prevailed upon the state to abrogate such usages as were inconsistent with our holy religion, and to introduce many others that were more conformable thereto. And this perhaps may have partly been the cause that we find not only some rules of the Mosaical, but also of the imperial and pontifical, laws, blended and adopted into our own system.

A further reason may also be given for the great variety, and, of course, the uncertain original, of our antient established customs, even after the Saxon government was firmly established in this island,—viz., the subdivision of the kingdom into an heptarchy, consisting of seven independent kingdoms, peopled and governed by different clans and colonies. This must necessarily create an infinite diversity of laws, even though all those colonies of Jutes, Angles, Anglo-Saxons, and the like originally sprung from the same mother-country, the great Northern hive, which poured forth its warlike progeny, and swarmed all over Europe, in the sixth and seventh centuries. This multiplicity of laws will necessarily be the case in some degree where any kingdom is cantoned out into any provincial establishments, and not under one common dispensation of laws, though under the same sovereign power. Much more will it happen where seven unconnected states are to form their own constitution and superstructure of government, though they all begin to build upon the same or similar foundations.

When therefore the West Saxons had swallowed up all the rest, and king Alfred succeeded to the monarchy of England, whereof his grandfather Egbert was the founder, his mighty genius prompted him to undertake a most great and necessary work, which he is said to have executed in as **411]masterly a manner, no less than to new-model the constitution, to rebuild it on a plan that should endure for ages, and out of its old discordant materials, which were heaped upon each other in a vast and rude irregularity, to form one uniform and well-connected whole. This he effected by reducing the whole kingdom under one regular and gradual subordination of government, wherein each man was answerable to his immediate superior for his own conduct and that of his nearest neighbours: for to him we owe that master-piece of judicial polity, the subdivision of England into tithings and hundreds, if not into counties, all under the influence and administration of one supreme magistrate, the king; in whom, as in a general reservoir, all the executive authority of the law was lodged, and from whom justice was dispersed to every part of the nation by distinct yet communicating ducts and channels; which wise institution has been preserved for near a thousand years unchanged, from Alfred’s to the present time. He also, like another Theodosius, collected the various customs that he found dispersed in the kingdom, and reduced and digested them into one uniform system or code of laws, in his Dom-bec, or liber judicialis.* This he compiled for the use of the court-baron, hundred, and county court, the court-leet, and sheriff’s tourn, tribunals which he established for the trial of all causes, civil and criminal, in the very districts wherein the complaint arose; all of them subject, however, to be inspected, controlled, and kept within the bounds of the universal or common law by the king’s own courts, which were then itinerant, being kept in the king’s palace, and removing with his household in those royal progresses, which he continually made from one end of the kingdom to the other.

The Danish invasion and conquest, which introduced new foreign customs, was a severe blow to this noble fabric; but a plan so excellently concerted could never be long thrown aside. So that upon the expulsion of these intruders the English returned to their antient law, retaining, however, some few of the customs of their late visitants, which went *[*412under the name of Dane-Lage: as the code compiled by Alfred was called the West-Saxon-Lage; and the local constitutions of the antient kingdom of Mereia, which obtained in the countries nearest to Wales, and probably abounded with many British customs, were called the Mercen-Lage. And these three laws were, about the beginning of the eleventh century, in use in different counties of the realm, the provincial polity of counties and their subdivisions having never been altered or discontinued through all the shocks and mutations of government from the time of its first institution, though the laws and customs therein used have (as we shall see) often suffered considerable changes.

For king Edgar, (who, besides military merit, as founder of the English navy, was also a most excellent civil governor,) observing the ill effects of three distinct bodies of laws prevailing at once in separate parts of his dominions, projected and begun what his grandson king Edward the Confessor afterwards completed,—viz., one uniform digest or body of laws to be observed throughout the whole kingdom; being probably no more than a revival of king Alfred’s code, with some improvements suggested by necessity and experience, particularly the incorporating some of the British or rather Mercian customs, and also such of the Danish as were reasonable and approved, into the West-Saxon-Lage, which was still the groundwork of the whole. And this appears to be the bestsupported and most plausible conjecture (for certainty is not to be expected) of the rise and original of that admirable system of maxims and unwritten customs, which is now known by the name of the common law, as extending its authority universally over all the realm, and which is doubtless of Saxon parentage.

Among the most remarkable of the Saxon laws we may reckon,—1. The constitution of parliaments, or, rather, general assemblies of the principal and wisest men in the nation; the wittena-gemote, or commune consilium, of the antient Germans, which was not yet reduced to the forms and *[*413distinctions of our modern parliament, without whose concurrence, however, no new law could be made or old one altered. 2. The election of their magistrates by the people,—originally even that of their kings, till dear-bought experience evinced the convenience and necessity of establishing an hereditary succession to the crown. But that of all subordinate magistrates, their military officers or heretochs, their sheriffs, their conservators of the peace, their coroners, their portreeves, (since changed into mayors and bailiffs,) and even their tithingmen and borsholders at the leet, continued, some till the Norman conquest, others for two centuries after, and some remain to this day. 3. The descent of the crown, when once a royal family was established, upon nearly the same hereditary principles upon which it has ever since continued; only that perhaps, in case or minority, the next of kin of full age would ascend the throne as king, and not as protector, though after his death the crown immediately reverted back to the heir. 4. The great paucity of capital punishments for the first offence, even the most notorious offenders being allowed to commute it for a fine or weregild, or, in default of payment, perpetual bondage; to which our benefit of clergy has now in some measure succeeded. 5. The prevalence of certain customs, as heriots and military services in proportion to every man’s land, which much resembled the feodal constitution, but yet were exempt from all its rigorous hardships; and which may be well enough accounted for by supposing them to be brought from the continent by the first Saxon invaders, in the primitive moderation and simplicity of the feodal law, before it got into the hands of the Norman jurists, who extracted the most slavish doctrines and oppressive consequences out of what was originally intended as a law of liberty. 6. That their estates were liable to forfeiture for treason, but that the doctrine of escheats and corruption of blood for felony, or any other cause, was utterly unknown amongst them. 7. The descent of their lands to all the males equally, without any right of primogeniture; a custom which obtained among the Britons, was agreeable to the Roman law, and continued among the Saxons till the Norman conquest: **414]though really inconvenient, and more especially destructive to antient families, which are in monarchies necessary to be supported, in order to form and keep up a nobility or intermediate state between the prince and the common people. 8. The courts of justice consisted principally of the county courts, and, in cases of weight or nicety, the king’s court held before himself in person, at the time of his parliaments, which were usually holden in different places, according as he kept the three great festivals of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide; an institution which was adopted by king Alfonso VII. of Castile, about a century after the conquest, who at the same three great feasts was wont to assemble his nobility and prelates in his court, who there heard and decided all controversies, and then, having received his instructions, departed home.(d) These county courts, however, differed from the modern ones in that the ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction were blended together, the bishop and the ealdorman or sheriff sitting in the same county court; and also that the decisions and proceedings therein were much more simple and unembarrassed: an advantage which will always attend the infancy of any laws, but wear off as they gradually advance to antiquity. 9. Trials among a people who had a very strong tincture of superstition were permitted to be by ordeal, by the corsned, or morsel of execration, or by wager of law with compurgators, if the party chose it; but frequently they were also by jury: for, whether or no their juries consisted precisely of twelve men or were bound to a strict unanimity, yet the general constitution of this admirable criterion of truth and most important guardian both of public and private liberty we owe to our Saxon ancestors. Thus stood the general frame of our polity at the time of the Norman invasion, when the second period of our legal history commences.

II. This remarkable event wrought as great an alteration in our laws as it did in our antient line of kings; and though the alteration of the former was effected rather by the **415]consent of the people than any right of conquest, yet that consent seems to have been partly extorted by fear, and partly given without any apprehension of the consequences which afterwards ensued.

1. Among the first of these alterations we may reckon the separation of the ecclesiastical courts from the civil, effected in order to ingratiate the new king with the popish clergy, who for some time before had been endeavouring all over Europe to exempt themselves from the secular power, and whose demands the Conqueror, like a politic prince, though it prudent to comply with, by reason that their reputed sanctity had a great influence over the minds of the people, and because all the little learning of the times was engrossed into their hands, which made them necessary men and by all means to be gained over to his interests. And this was the more easily effected, because the disposal of all the episcopal sees being then in the breast of the king, he had taken care to fill them with Italian and Norman prelates.

2. Another violent alteration of the English constitution consisted in the depopulation of whole counties for the purposes of the king’s royal diversion, and subjecting both them and all the antient forests of the kingdom to the unreasonable severities of forest-laws imported from the continent, whereby the slaughter of a beast was made almost as penal as the death of a man. In the Saxon times, though no man was allowed to kill or chase the king’s deer, yet he might start any game, pursue and kill it upon his own estate. But the rigour of these new constitutions vested the sole property of all the game in England in the king alone;2 and no man was entitled to disturb any fowl of the air, or any beast of the field, of such kinds as were specially reserved for the royal amusement of the sovereign, without express license from the king by a grant of a chase or free-warren; and those franchises were granted as much with a view to preserve the breed of animals as to indulge the subject. From a similar principle to which, though the forest-laws are now mitigated, and by degrees *[*416grown entirely obsolete, yet from this root has sprung a bastard slip, known by the name of the game-law, now arrived to and wantoning in its highest vigour: both founded upon the same unreasonable notions of permanent property in wild creatures, and both productive of the same tyranny to the commons, but with this difference, that the forest-laws established only one mighty hunter throughout the land, the game-laws have raised a little Nimrod in every manor. And in one respect the antient law was much less unreasonable than the modern; for the king’s grantee of a chase or free-warren might kill game in every part of his franchise; but now, though a freeholder of less than 100l. a year is forbidden to kill a partridge upon his own estate, yet nobody else (not even the lord of the manor, unless he hath a grant of free-warren) can do it without committing a trespass and subjecting himself to an action.

3. A third alteration in the English laws was by narrowing the remedial influence of the county courts, the great seats of Saxon justice, and extending the original jurisdiction of the king’s justiciars to all kinds of causes arising in all parts of the kingdom. To this end the aula regis, with all its multifarious authority, was erected, and a capital justiciary appointed, with powers so large and boundless that he became at length a tyrant to the people and formidable to the crown itself. The constitution of this court, and the judges themselves who presided there, were fetched from the duchy of Normandy; and the consequence naturally was, the ordaining that all proceedings in the king’s courts should be carried on in the Norman instead of the English language; a provision the more necessary, because none of his Norman justiciars understood English; but as evident a badge of slavery as ever was imposed upon a conquered people. This lasted till king Edward the Third obtained a double victory, over the armies of France in their own country, and their language in our courts here at home. But there was one mischief too deeply rooted thereby, and which this caution of *[*417king Edward came too late to eradicate. Instead of the plain and easy method of determining suits in the county courts, the chicanes and subtleties of Norman jurisprudence had taken possession of the king’s courts, to which every cause of consequence was drawn. Indeed, that age and those immediately succeeding it were the era of refinement and subtility. There is an active principle in the human soul that will ever be exerting its faculties to the utmost stretch, in whatever employment, by the accidents of time and place, the general plan of education, or the customs and manners of the age and country, it may happen to find itself engaged. The Northern conquerors of Europe were then emerging from the grossest ignorance in point of literature; and those who had leisure to cultivate its progress were such only as were cloistered in monasteries, the rest being all soldiers or peasants. And, unfortunately, the first rudiments of science which they imbibed were those of Aristotle’s philosophy, conveyed through the medium of his Arabian commentators, which were brought from the East by the Saracens into Palestine and Spain, and translated into barbarous Latin. So that, though the materials upon which they were naturally employed in the infancy of a rising state were those of the noblest kind, the establishment of religion and the regulations of civil polity, yet, having only such tools to work with, their execution was trifling and flimsy. Both the divinity and the law of those times were therefore frittered into logical distinctions, and drawn out into metaphysical subtleties, with a skill most amazingly artificial, but which serves no other purpose than to show the vast powers of the human intellect, however vainly or preposterously employed. Hence the law in particular, which (being intended for universal reception) ought to be a plain rule of action, became a science of the greatest infricacy, especially when blended with the new refinements engrafted upon feodal property: which refinements were from time to time gradually introduced by the Norman practitioners, with a view to supersede (as they did in great measure) the more homely, but more intelligible, maxims of distributive justice among the Saxons. And, to say the truth, these **418]scholastic reformers have transmitted their dialect and finesses to posterity so interwoven in the body of our legal polity that they cannot now be taken out without a manifest injury to the substance. Statute after statute has in later times been made to pare off these troublesome excrescences and restore the common law to its pristine simplicity and vigour: and the endeavour has greatly succeeded; but still the scars are deep and visible; and the liberality of our modern courts of justice is frequently obliged to have recourse to unaccountable fictions and circuities in order to recover that equitable and substantial justice which for a long time was totally buried under the narrow rules and fanciful niceties of metaphysical and Norman jurisprudence.

4. A fourth innovation was the introduction of the trial by combat, for the decision of all civil and criminal questions of fact in the last resort. This was the immemorial practice of all the Northern nations, but first reduced to regular and stated forms among the Burgundii, about the close of the fifth century; and from them it passed to other nations, particularly the Franks and Normans, which last had the honour to establish it here, though clearly an unchristian, as well as most uncertain, method of trial. But it was a sufficient recommendation of it to the Conqueror and his warlike countrymen that it was the usage of their native duchy of Normandy.

5. But the last and most important alteration, both in our civil and military polity, was the engrafting on all landed estates—a few only excepted—the fiction of feodal tenure, which drew after it a numerous and oppressive train of servile fruits and appendages, aids, reliefs, primer seisins, wardships, marriages, escheats, and fines for alienation,—the genuine consequences of the maxim then adopted, that all the lands in England were derived from and holden, mediately or immediately, of the crown.

The nation at this period seems to have groaned under as absolute a slavery as was in the power of a warlike, an **419]ambitious, and a politic prince to create. The consciences of men were enslaved by sour ecclesiastics, devoted to a foreign power, and unconnected with the civil state under which they lived, who now imported from Rome for the first time the whole farrago of superstitious novelties which had been engendered by the blindness and corruption of the times between the first mission of Augustin the monk and the Norman conquest, such as transubstantiation, purgatory, communion in one kind, and the worship of saints and images, not forgetting the universal supremacy and dogmatical infallibility of the holy see. The laws, too, as well as the prayers, were administered in an unknown tongue. The antient trial by jury gave way to the impious decision by battel. The forest-laws totally restrained all rural pleasures and manly recreations. And in cities and towns the case was no better, all company being obliged to disperse, and fire and candle to be extinguished, by eight at night, at the sound of the melancholy curfeu. The ultimate property of all lands, and a considerable share of the present profits, were vested in the king, or by him granted out to his Norman favourites, who, by a gradual progression of slavery, were absolute vassals to the crown, and as absolute tyrants to the commons. Unheard-of forfeitures, talliages, aids, and fines were arbitrarily extracted from the pillaged landholders, in pursuance of the new system of tenure. And, to crown all, as a consequence of the tenure by knight-service, the king had always ready at his command an army of sixty thousand knights or milites, who were bound, upon pain of confiscating their estates, to attend him in time of invasion or to quell any domestic insurrection. Trade, or foreign merchandise, such as it then was, was carried on by the Jews and Lombards, and the very name of an English fleet, which king Edgar had rendered so formidable, was utterly unknown to Europe: the nation consisting wholly of the clergy, who were also the lawyers; the barons, or great lords of the land; the knights, or soldiery, who were the subordinate landholders; and the burghers, or inferior tradesmen, who from their insignificance happily retained, in their socage and burgage tenure, some *[*420points of their antient freedom. All the rest were villeins or bondmen.

From so complete and well-concerted a scheme of servility it has been the work of generations for our ancestors to redeem themselves and their posterity into that state of liberty which we now enjoy, and which therefore is not to be looked upon as consisting of mere encroachments on the crown and infringements on the prerogative, as some slavish and narrow-minded writers in the last century endeavoured to maintain, but as, in general, a gradual restoration of that antient constitution whereof our Saxon forefathers had been unjustly deprived, partly by the policy and partly by the force of the Norman. How that restoration has in a long series of years been step by step effected I now proceed to inquire.

William Rufus proceeded on his father’s plan, and in some points extended it, particularly with regard to the forest-laws. But his brother and successor. Henry the First, found it expedient, when first he came to the crown, to ingratiate himself with the people, by restoring (as our monkish historians tell us) the laws of king Edward the Confessor. The ground whereof is this: that by charter he gave up the great grievances of marriage, ward, and relief, the beneficial pecuniary fruits of his feodal tenures, but reserved the tenures themselves, for the same military purposes that his father introduced them. He also abolished the curfeu;(e) for, though it is mentioned in our laws a full century afterwards,(f) yet it is rather spoken of as a known time of night (so denominated from that abrogated usage) than as a still subsisting custom. There is extant a code of laws in his name, consisting partly of those of the Confessor, but with great additions and alterations of his own, and chiefly calculated for the regulation of the county courts. It contains some directions as to crimes and their punishments, (that of theft being made capital in his reign,) and a few things relating to estates, *[*421particularly as to the descent of lands: which being by the Saxon laws equally to all the sons, by the feodal or Norman to the eldest only, king Henry here moderated the difference, directing the eldest son to have only the principal estate, “primum patris feudum,” the rest of his estates, if he had any others, being equally divided among them all. On the other hand, he gave up to the clergy the free election of bishops and mitred abbots, reserving, however, these ensigns of patronage, conge d’eslire, custody of the temporalities when vacant, and homage upon their restitution. He, lastly, united again for a time the civil and ecclesiastical courts, which union was soon dissolved by his Norman clergy; and, upon that final dissolution, the cognizance of testamentary causes seems to have been first given to the ecclesiastical court. The rest remained as in his father’s time; from whence we may easily perceive now far short this was of a thorough restitution of king Edward’s or the Saxon laws.

The usurper Stephen, as the manner of usurpers is, promised much at his accession, especially with regard to redressing the grievances of the forest-laws, but performed no great matter either in that or in any other point. It is from his reign, however, that we are to date the introduction of the Roman civil and canon laws into this realm; and at the same time was imported the doctrine of appeals to the court of Rome, as a branch of the canon law.

By the time of king Henry the Second, if not earlier, the charter of Henry the First seems to have been forgotten, for we find the claim of marriage, ward, and relief then flourishing in full vigour. The right of primogeniture seems also to have tacitly revived, being found more convenient for the public than the parcelling of estates into a multitude of minute subdivisions. However, in this prince’s reign much was done to methodize the laws and reduce them into a regular order, as appears from that excellent treatise of Glanvil, which, though some of it be now antiquated and altered, yet, when compared with the code of Henry the First, **422]it carries a manifest superiority.(g) Throughout his reign also was continued the important struggle, which we have had occasion so often to mention, between the laws of England and Rome: the former supported by the strength of the temporal nobility, when endeavoured to be supplanted in favour of the latter by the popish clergy; which dispute was kept on foot till the reign of Edward the First, when the laws of England, under the new discipline introduced by that skilful commander, obtained a complete and permanent victory. In the present reign of Henry the Second there are four things which peculiarly merit the attention of a legal antiquarian: 1. The constitutions of the parliament at Clarendon, ad 1164, whereby the king checked the power of the pope and his clergy, and greatly narrowed the total exemption they claimed from the secular jurisdiction, though his further progress was unhappily stopped by the fatal events of the disputes between him and archbishop Becket. 2. The institution of the office of justices in eyre,—in itinere; the king having divided the kingdom into six circuits, (a little different from the present,) and commissioned these new-created judges to administer justice and try writs of assize in the several counties. These remedies are said to have been then first invented; before which all causes were usually terminated in the county courts, according to the Saxon custom, or before the king’s justiciaries in the aula regis, in pursuance of the Norman regulations. The latter of which tribunals, travelling about with the king’s person, occasioned intolerable expense and delay to the suitors; and the former, however proper for little debts or minute actions, where even injustice is better than procrastination, were now become liable to too much ignorance of the law and too much partiality as to facts to determine matters of considerable moment. 3. The introduction and establishment of the grand assize, or trial by special kind of jury in a writ of right, at the option of the tenant or defendant, instead of the barbarous and Norman trial by battel. 4. To this time must also be referred the introduction of escuage, or pecuniary **423]commutation for personal military service, which in process of time was the parent of the antient subsidies granted to the crown by parliament, and the land-tax of later times.

Richard the First, a brave and magnanimous prince, was a sportsman as well as a soldier, and therefore enforced the forest-laws with some rigour, which occasioned many discontents among his people: though (according to Matthew Paris) he repealed the penalties of castration, loss of eyes, and cutting off the hands and feet, before inflicted on such as transgressed in hunting, probably finding that their severity prevented prosecutions. He also, when abroad, composed a body of naval laws at the isle of Oleron, which are still extant, and of high authority; for in his time we began again to discover that (as an island) we were naturally a maritime power. But with regard to civil proceedings we find nothing very remarkable in this reign, except a few regulations regarding the Jews and the justices in eyre, the king’s thoughts being chiefly taken up by the knight-errantry of a croisade against the Saracens in the holy land.

In king John’s time, and that of his son Henry the Third, the rigours of the feodal tenures and the forest-laws were so warmly kept up that they occasioned many insurrections of the barons or principal feudatories: which at last had this effect, that first king John, and afterwards his son, consented to the two famous charters of English liberties, magna carta and carta de foresta. Of these the latter was well calculated to redress many grievances and encroachments of the crown in the exertion of forest-law; and the former confirmed many liberties of the church, and redressed many grievances incident to feodal tenures, of no small moment at the time, though now, unless considered attentively and with this retrospect, they seem but of trifling concern. But, besides these feodal provisions, care was also taken therein to protect the subject against other oppressions, then frequently arising from unreasonable amercements, from illegal distresses, or other process for debts or services due to the crown, and *[*424from the tyrannical abuse of the prerogative of purveyance and preemption. It fixed the forfeiture of lands for felony in the same manner as it still remains; prohibited for the future the grants of exclusive fisheries, and the erection of new bridges, so as to oppress the neighbourhood. With respect to private rights, it established the testamentary power of the subject over part of his personal estate, the rest being distributed among his wife and children; it laid down the law of dower as it hath continued ever since, and prohibited the appeals of women, unless for the death of their husbands. In matters of public police and national concern it enjoined a uniformity of weights and measures, gave new encouragements to commerce, by the protection of merchant strangers, and forbade the alienation of lands in mortmain. With regard to the administration of justice, besides prohibiting all denials or delays of it, it fixed the court of common pleas at Westminster, that the suitors might no longer be harassed with following the king’s person in all his progresses, and at the same time brought the trial of issues home to the very doors of the free-holders, by directing assizes to be taken in the proper counties, and establishing annual circuits; it also corrected some abuses then incident to the trials by wager of law and of battel, directed the regular awarding of inquest for life or member, prohibiting the king’s inferior ministers from holding pleas of the crown or trying any criminal charge, whereby many forfeitures might otherwise have unjustly accrued to the exchequer, and regulated the time and place of holding the inferior tribunals of justice, the county-court, sheriff’s tourn, and court-leet. It confirmed and established the liberties of the city of London and all other cities, boroughs, towns, and ports of the kingdom. And, lastly, (which alone would have merited the title that it bears, of the great charter,) it protected every individual of the nation in the free enjoyment of his life, his liberty, and his property, unless declared to be forfeited by the judgment of his peers or the law of the land.3

*[*425However, by means of these struggles, the pope in the reign of king John gained a still greater ascendant here than he ever had before enjoyed; which continued through the long reign of his son Henry the Third, in the beginning of whose time the old Saxon trial by ordeal was also totally abolished. And we may by this time perceive, in Bracton’s treatise, a still further improvement in the method and regularity of the common law, especially in the point of pleadings.(h) Nor must it be forgotten that the first traces which remain of the separation of the greater barons from the less, in the constitutions of parliaments, are found in the great charter of king John, though omitted in that of Henry III.; and that, towards the end of the latter of these reigns, we find the first record of any writ for summoning knights, citizens, and burgesses to parliament. And here we conclude the second period of our English legal history.

III. The third commences with the reign of Edward the First, who hath justly been styled our English Justinian. For in his time the law did receive so sudden a perfection, that Sir Matthew Hale does not scruple to affirm(i) that more was done in the first thirteen years of his reign to settle and establish the distributive justice of the kingdom than in all the ages since that time put together.

It would be endless to enumerate all the particulars of these regulations; but the principal may be reduced under the following general heads:—1. He established, confirmed, and settled the great charter and charter of forests. 2. He gave a mortal wound to the encroachments of the pope and his clergy, by limiting and establishing the bounds of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and by obliging the ordinary, to whom all the goods of intestates at that time belonged, to discharge the debts of the deceased. 3. He defined the limits of the several temporal courts of the highest jurisdiction,—those of the king’s bench, common pleas, and exchequer,—so as **426]they might not interfere with each other’s proper business: to do which they must now have recourse to a fiction,—very necessary and beneficial in the present enlarged state of property. 4. He settled the boundaries of the inferior courts in counties, hundreds, and manors, confining them to causes of no great amount, according to their primitive institution, though of considerably greater than by the alteration of the value of money they are now permitted to determine. 5. He secured the property of the subject, by abolishing all arbitrary taxes and talliages levied without consent of the national council. 6. He guarded the common justice of the kingdom from abuses, by giving up the royal prerogative of sending mandates to interfere in private causes. 7. He settled the form, solemnities, and effect of fines levied in the court of common pleas, though the thing in itself was of Saxon original. 8. He first established a repository for the public records of the kingdom, few of which are antienter than the reign of his father, and those were by him collected. 9. He improved upon the laws of king Alfred, by that great and orderly method of watch and ward, for preserving the public peace and preventing robberies, established by the statute of Winchester. 10. He settled and reformed many abuses incident to tenures, and removed some restraints on the alienation of landed property, by the statute of quia emptores. 11. He instituted a speedier way for the recovery of debts, by granting execution, not only upon goods and chattels, but also upon lands, by writ of elegit, which was of signal benefit to a trading people: and upon the same commercial ideas he also allowed the charging of lands in a statute merchant, to pay debts contracted in trade, contrary to all feodal principles. 12. He effectually provided for the recovery of advowsons as temporal rights, in which, before, the law was extremely deficient. 13. He also effectually closed the great gulf, in which all the landed property of the kingdom was in danger of being swallowed, by his reiterated statutes of mortmain; most admirably adapted to meet the frauds that had then been devised, though afterwards contrived to be evaded by the invention of uses. **427]14. He established a new limitation of property by the creation of estates-tail, concerning the good policy of which modern times have, however, entertained a very different opinion. 15. He reduced all Wales to the subjection, not only of the crown, but in great measure of the laws, of England, (which was thoroughly completed in the reign of Henry the Eighth,) and seems to have entertained a design of doing the like by Scotland, so as to have formed an entire and complete union of the island of Great Britain.

I might continue this catalogue much further; but upon the whole we may observe that the very scheme and model of the administration of common justice between party and party was entirely settled by this king,(k) and has continued nearly the same in all succeeding ages to this day, abating some few alterations which the humour or necessity of subsequent times hath occasioned. The forms of writs, by which actions are commenced, were perfected in his reign, and established as models for posterity. The pleadings consequent upon the writs were then short, nervous, and perspicuous, not intricate, verbose, and formal. The legal treatises written in his time, as Britton, Fleta, Hengham, and the rest, are, for the most part, law at this day; or at least were so till the alteration of tenures took place. And, to conclude, it is from this period—from the exact observation of magna carta, rather than from its making or renewal, in the days of his grandfather and father—that the liberty of Englishmen began again to rear its head, though the weight of the military tenures hung heavy upon it for many ages after.

I cannot give a better proof of the excellence of his constitutions than that from his time to that of Henry the Eighth there happened very few, and those not very considerable, alterations in the legal forms of proceedings. As to matter of substance, the old Gothic powers of electing the principal subordinate magistrates, the sheriffs, and *[*428conservators of the peace were taken from the people in the reigns of Edward II. and Edward III., and justices of the peace were established instead of the latter. In the reign also of Edward the Third the parliament is supposed most probably to have assumed its present form, by a separation of the commons from the lords. The statute for defining and ascertaining treasons was one of the first productions of this new-modelled assembly, and the translation of the law proceedings from French into Latin another. Much also was done, under the auspices of this magnanimous prince, for establishing our domestic manufactures, by prohibiting the exportation of English wool, and the importation or wear of foreign cloth or furs, and by encouraging cloth-workers from other countries to settle here. Nor was the legislature inattentive to many other branches of commerce, or indeed to commerce in general; for, in particular, it enlarged the credit of the merchant, by introducing the statute staple, whereby he might the more readily pledge his lands for the security of his mercantile debts. And, as personal property now grew by the extension of trade to be much more considerable than formerly, care was taken, in case of intestacies, to appoint administrators particularly nominated by the law to distribute that personal property among the creditors and kindred of the deceased, which before had been usually applied, by the officers of the ordinary, to uses then denominated pious. The statutes also of præmunire, for effectually depressing the civil power of the pope, were the work of this and the subsequent reign. And the establishment of a laborious parochial clergy, by the endowment of vicarages out of the overgrown possessions of the monasteries, added lustre to the close of the fourteenth century, though the seeds of the general reformation, which were thereby first sown in the kingdom, were almost overwhelmed by the spirit of persecution introduced into the laws of the land by the influence of the regular clergy.

From this time to that of Henry the Seventh the civil wars and disputed titles to the crown gave no leisure for further *[*429juridical improvement: “nam silent leges inter arma.” And yet it is to these very disputes that we owe the happy loss of all the dominions of the crown on the continent of France, which turned the minds of our subsequent princes entirely to domestic concerns. To these likewise we owe the method of barring entails by the fiction of common recoveries, invented originally by the clergy to evade the statutes of mortmain, but introduced under Edward the Fourth for the purpose of unfettering estates and making them more liable to forfeiture; while, on the other hand, the owners endeavoured to protect them by the universal establishment of uses,—another of the clerical inventions.

In the reign of king Henry the Seventh, his ministers (not to say the king himself) were more industrious in hunting out prosecutions upon old and forgotten penal laws, in order to extort money from the subject, than in framing any new beneficial regulations. For the distinguishing character of this reign was that of amassing treasure in the king’s coffers by every means that could be devised: and almost every alteration in the laws, however salutary or otherwise in their future consequences, had this and this only for their great and immediate object. To this end the court of starchamber was new-modelled and armed with powers the most dangerous and unconstitutional over the persons and properties of the subject. Informations were allowed to be received, in lieu of indictments, at the assizes and sessions of the peace, in order to multiply fines and pecuniary penalties. The statute of fines for landed property was craftily and covertly contrived, to facilitate the destruction of entails and make the owners of real estates more capable to forfeit as well as to alien. The benefit of clergy (which so often intervened to stop attainders and save the inheritance) was now allowed only once to lay offenders, who only could have inheritances to lose. A writ of capias was permitted in all actions on the case, and the defendant might in consequence be outlawed, because upon such outlawry his goods became the property of the crown. In short, there is hardly a statute in this reign **430]introductive of a new law or modifying the old but what either directly or obliquely tended to the emolument of the exchequer.

IV. This brings us to the fourth period of our legal history,—viz., the reformation of religion, under Henry the Eighth and his children; which opens an entire new scene in ecclesiastical matters; the usurped power of the pope being now forever routed and destroyed, all his connections with this island cut off, the crown restored to its supremacy over spiritual men and causes, and the patronage of bishoprics being once more indisputably vested in the king. And had the spiritual courts been at this time reunited to the civil, we should have seen the old Saxon constitution with regard to the ecclesiastical polity completely restored.

With regard also to our civil polity, the statute of wills and the statute of uses (both passed in the reign of this prince) made a great alteration as to property: the former by allowing the devise of real estates by will, which before was in general forbidden; the latter by endeavouring to destroy the intricate nicety of uses, though the narrowness and pedantry of the courts of common law prevented this statute from having its full beneficial effect. And thence the courts of equity assumed a jurisdiction dictated by common justice and common sense, which, however arbitrarily exercised or productive of jealousies in its infancy, has at length been matured into a most elegant system of rational jurisprudence, the principles of which (notwithstanding they may differ in forms) are now equally adopted by the courts of both law and equity. From the statute of uses, and another statute of the same antiquity, (which protected estates for years from being destroyed by the reversioner,) a remarkable alteration took place in the mode of conveyancing: the antient assurance by feoffment and livery upon the land being now very seldom practised, since the more easy and more private invention of transferring property, by secret conveyances to uses and long terms of years, being now continually created in mortgages **431]and family settlements, which may be moulded to a thousand useful purposes by the ingenuity of an able artist.

The further attacks in this reign upon the immunity of estates-tail, which reduced them to little more than the conditional fees at the common law before the passing of the statute de donis; the establishment of recognizances in the nature of a statute-staple, for facilitating the raising of money upon landed security; and the introduction of the bankrupt-laws, as well for the punishment of the fraudulent as the relief of the unfortunate trader,—all these were capital alterations of our legal polity, and highly convenient to that character, which the English began now to reassume, of a great commercial people. The incorporation of Wales with England, and the more uniform administration of justice, by destroying some counties palatine and abridging the unreasonable privileges of such as remained, added dignity and strength to the monarchy; and, together with the numerous improvements before observed upon, and the redress of many grievances and oppressions which had been introduced by his father, will ever make the administration of Henry VIII. a very distinguished era in the annals of juridical history.

It must be, however, remarked that (particularly in his latter years) the royal prerogative was then strained to a very tyrannical and oppressive height; and, what was the worst circumstance, its encroachments were established by law, under the sanction of those pusillanimous parliaments, one of which, to its eternal disgrace, passed a statute whereby it was enacted that the king’s proclamations should have the force of acts of parliament; and others concurred in the creation of that amazing heap of wild and new-fangled treasons, which were slightly touched upon in a former chapter.(l) Happily for the nation, this arbitrary reign was succeeded by the minority of an amiable prince, during the short sunshine of which great part of these extravagant laws were repealed. And to do justice to the shorter reign of queen Mary, *[*432many salutary and popular laws in civil matters were made under her administration, perhaps the better to reconcile the people to the bloody measures which she was induced to pursue for the re-establishment of religious slavery: the well-concerted schemes for effecting which were (through the providence of God) defeated by the seasonable accession of queen Elizabeth.

The religious liberties of the nation being by that happy event established (we trust) on an eternal basis, (though obliged in their infancy to be guarded against papists and other non-conformists by laws of too sanguinary a nature,) the forest-laws having fallen into disuse, and the administration of civil rights in the courts of justice being carried on in a regular course, according to the wise institutions of king Edward the First, without any material innovations, all the principal grievances introduced by the Norman conquest seem to have been gradually shaken off, and our Saxon constitution restored, with considerable improvements, except only in the continuation of the military tenures, and a few other points, which still armed the crown with a very oppressive and dangerous prerogative. It is also to be remarked that the spirit of enriching the clergy and endowing religious houses had (through the former abuse of it) gone over to such a contrary extreme, and the princes of the house of Tudor and their favourites had fallen with such avidity upon the spoils of the church, that a decent and honourable maintenance was wanting to many of the bishops and clergy. This produced the restraining statutes, to prevent the alienations of lands and tithes belonging to the church and universities. The number of indigent persons being also greatly increased, by withdrawing the alms of the monasteries, a plan was formed in the reign of queen Elizabeth, more humane and beneficial than even feeding and clothing of millions, by affording them the means (with proper industry) to feed and to clothe themselves. And the further any subsequent plans for maintaining the poor have departed from this institution, the more impracticable and even pernicious their visionary attempts have proved.

*[*433However, considering the reign of queen Elizabeth in a great and political view, we have no reason to regret many subsequent alterations in the English constitution. For though in general she was a wise and excellent princess, and loved her people; though in her time trade flourished, riches increased, the laws were duly administered, the nation was respected abroad, and the people happy at home: yet the increase of the power of the starchamber and the erection of the high-commission court in matters ecclesiastical were the work of her reign. She also kept her parliament at a very awful distance; and in many particulars she at times would carry the prerogative as high as her most arbitrary predecessors. It is true she very seldom exerted this prerogative so as to oppress individuals, but still she had it to exert; and therefore the felicity of her reign depended more on her want of opportunity and inclination than want of power to play the tyrant. This is a high encomium on her merit, but at the same time it is sufficient to show that these were not those golden days of genuine liberty that we formerly were taught to believe: for surely the true liberty of the subject consists not so much in the gracious behaviour as in the limited power of the sovereign.

The great revolutions that had happened in manners and in property had paved the way, by imperceptible yet sure degrees, for as great a revolution in government; yet, while that revolution was effecting, the crown became more arbitrary than ever, by the progress of those very means which afterwards reduced its power. It is obvious to every observer that till the close of the Lancastrian civil wars the property and the power of the nation were chiefly divided between the king, the nobility, and the clergy. The commons were generally in a state of great ignorance; their personal wealth before the extension of trade was comparatively small; and the nature of their landed property was such as kept them in continual dependence upon their feodal lord, being usually some powerful baron, some opulent abbey, **434]or sometimes the king himself. Though a notion of general liberty had strongly pervaded and animated the whole constitution, yet the particular liberty, the natural equality, and personal independence of individuals were little regarded or thought of; nay, even to assert them was treated as the height of sedition and rebellion. Our ancestors heard with detestation and horror those sentiments rudely delivered and pushed to most absurd extremes, by the violence of a Cade and a Tyler, which have since been applauded, with a zeal almost rising to idolatry, when softened and recommended by the eloquence, the moderation, and the arguments of a Sidney, a Locke, and a Milton.

But when learning, by the invention of printing and the progress of religious reformation, began to be universally disseminated,—when trade and navigation were suddenly carried to an amazing extent by the use of the compass and the consequent discovery of the Indies,—the minds of men, thus enlightened by science and enlarged by observation and travel, began to entertain a more just opinion of the dignity and rights of mankind. An inundation of wealth flowed in upon the merchants and middling rank; while the two great estates of the kingdom, which formerly had balanced the prerogative, the nobility and clergy, were greatly impoverished and weakened. The popish clergy, detected in their frauds and abuses, exposed to the resentment of the populace, and stripped of their lands and revenues, stood trembling for their very existence. The nobles, enervated by the refinements of luxury (which knowledge, foreign travel, and the progress of the politer arts are too apt to introduce with themselves) and fired with disdain at being rivalled in magnificence by the opulent citizens, fell into enormous expenses; to gratify which, they were permitted, by the policy of the times, to dissipate their overgrown estates and alienate their antient patrimonies. This gradually reduced their power and their influence within a very moderate bound, while the king, by the spoil of the monasteries and the great increase of the customs, grew rich, independent, and haughty: and the **435]commons were not yet sensible of the strength they had acquired, nor urged to examine its extent by new burdens or oppressive taxations, during the sudden opulence of the exchequer. Intent upon acquiring new riches, and happy in being freed from the insolence and tyranny of the orders more immediately above them, they never dreamed of opposing the prerogative to which they had been so little accustomed, much less of taking the lead in opposition, to which by their weight and their property they were now entitled. The latter years of Henry the Eighth were therefore the times of the greatest despotism that have been known in this island since the death of William the Norman: the prerogative as it then stood by common law (and much more when extended by act of parliament) being too large to be endured in a land of liberty.

Queen Elizabeth and the intermediate princes of the Tudor line had almost the same legal powers, and sometimes exerted them as roughly, as their father king Henry the Eighth. But the critical situation of that princess with regard to her legitimacy, her religion, her enmity with Spain, and her jealousy of the queen of Scots, occasioned greater caution in her conduct. She probably, or her able advisers, had penctration enough to discern how the power of the kingdom had gradually shifted its channel, and wisdom enough not to provoke the commons to discover and feel their strength. She therefore threw a veil over the odious part of prerogative, which was never wantonly thrown aside, but only to answer some important purpose; and though the royal treasury no longer overflowed with the wealth of the clergy, which had been all granted out and had contributed to enrich the people, she asked for supplies with such moderation, and managed them with so much economy, that the commons were happy in obliging her. Such, in short, were her circumstances, her necessities, her wisdom, and her good disposition, that never did a prince so long and so entirely, for the space of half a century together, reign in the affections of the people.

*[*436On the accession of king James I., no new degree of royal power was added to or exercised by him; but such a sceptre was too weighty to be wielded by such a hand. The unreasonable and imprudent exertion of what was then deemed to be prerogative, upon trivial and unworthy occasions, and the claim of a more absolute power inherent in the kingly office than had ever been carried into practice, soon awakened the sleeping lion. The people heard with astonishment doctrines preached from the throne and the pulpit subversive of liberty and property and all the natural rights of humanity. They examined into the divinity of this claim, and found it weakly and fallaciously supported; and common reason assured them that, if it were of human origin, no constitution could establish it without power of revocation, no precedent could sanctify, no length of time could confirm it. The leaders felt the pulse of the nation, and found they had ability as well as inclination to resist it; and accordingly resisted and opposed it, whenever the pusillanimous temper of the reigning monarch had courage to put it to the trial; and they gained some little victories in the cases of concealments, monopolies, and the dispensing power. In the mean time, very little was done for the improvement of private justice, except the abolition of sanctuaries and the extension of the bankrupt-laws, the limitation of suits and actions, and the regulating of informations upon penal statutes. For I cannot class the laws against witchcraft and conjuration under the head of improvements; nor did the dispute between lord Ellesmere and Sir Edward Coke, concerning the powers of the court of chancery, tend much to the advancement of justice.

Indeed, when Charles the First succeeded to the crown of his father, and attempted to revive some enormities which had been dormant in the reign of king James, the loans and benevolences extorted from the subject, the arbitrary imprisonments for refusal, the exertion of martial law in time of peace, and other domestic grievances, clouded the morning of that *[*437misguided prince’s reign, which, though the noon of it began a little to brighten, at last went down in blood and left the whole kingdom in darkness. It must be acknowledged that by the petition of right, enacted to abolish these encroachments, the English constitution received great alteration and improvement. But there still remained the latent power of the forest-laws, which the crown most unseasonably revived. The legal jurisdiction of the starchamber and high-commission courts was extremely great, though their usurped authority was greater. And if we add to these the disuse of parliaments, the ill-timed zeal and despotic proceedings of the ecclesiastical governors in matters of mere indifference, together with the arbitrary levies of tonnage and poundage, ship-money, and other projects, we may see grounds most amply sufficient for seeking redress in a legal constitutional way. This redress, when sought, was also constitutionally given; for all these oppressions were actually abolished by the king in parliament, before the rebellion broke out, by the several statutes for triennial parliaments, for abolishing the starchamber and high-commission courts, for ascertaining the extent of forests and forest-laws, for renouncing ship-money and other exactions, and for giving up the prerogative of knighting the king’s tenants in capite in consequence of their feodal tenures; though it must be acknowledged that these concessions were not made with so good a grace as to conciliate the confidence of the people. Unfortunately, either by his own mismanagement, or by the arts of his enemies, the king had lost the reputation of sincerity,—which is the greatest unhappiness that can befall a prince. Though he formerly had strained his prerogative, not only beyond what the genius of the present times would bear, but also beyond the examples of former ages, he had now consented to reduce it to a lower ebb than was consistent with monarchical government. A conduct so opposite to his temper and principles, joined with some rash actions and unguarded expressions, made the people suspect that this condescension was merely temporary. Flushed therefore with the success they had gained, fired with resentment for past oppressions, **438]and dreading the consequences if the king should regain his power, the popular leaders (who in all ages have called themselves the people) began to grow insolent and ungovernable; their insolence soon rendered them desperate; and despair at length forced them to join with a set of military hypocrites and enthusiasts, who overturned the church and monarchy, and proceeded with deliberate solemnity to the trial and murder of their sovereign.

I pass by the crude and abortive schemes for amending the laws in the times of confusion which followed, the most promising and sensible whereof (such as the establishment of new trials, the abolition of feodal tenures, the act of navigation, and some others) were adopted in the

V. Fifth period, which I am next to mention,—viz., after the restoration of king Charles II. Immediately upon which, the principal remaining grievance, the doctrine and consequences of military tenures, were taken away and abolished, except in the instance of corruption of inheritable blood, upon attainder of treason and felony. And though the monarch in whose person the regal government was restored, and with it our antient constitution, deserves no commendation from posterity, yet in his reign (wicked, sanguinary, and turbulent as it was) the concurrence of happy circumstances was such that from thence we may date not only the re-establishment of our church and monarchy, but also the complete restitution of English liberty, for the first time since its total abolition at the conquest. For therein not only these slavish tenures—the badge of foreign dominion, with all their oppressive appendages—were removed from encumbering the estates of the subject, but also an additional security of his person from imprisonment was obtained by that great bulwark of our constitution, the habeas corpus act. These two statutes, with regard to our property and persons, form a second magna carta, as beneficial and effectual as that of Running-Mead. That only pruned the luxuriances of the feodal system; but the statute of Charles the Second extirpated all its **439]slaveries, except perhaps in copyhold tenure; and there also they are now in great measure enervated by gradual custom and the interposition of our courts of justice. Magna carta only, in general terms, declared that no man shall be imprisoned contrary to law: the habeas corpus act points him out effectual means, as well to release himself, though committed even by the king in council, as to punish all those who shall thus unconstitutionally misuse him.

To these I may add the abolition of the prerogatives of purveyance and preemption; the statute for holding triennial parliaments; the test and corporation acts, which secure both our civil and religious liberties; the abolition of the writ de hæretico comburendo; the statute of frauds and perjuries, a great and necessary security to private property; the statute for distribution of intestates’ estates, and that of amendments and jeofails, which cut off those superfluous niceties which so long had disgraced our courts; together with many other wholesome acts that were passed in this reign for the benefit of navigation and the improvement of foreign commerce: and the whole, when we likewise consider the freedom from taxes and armies which the subject then enjoyed, will be sufficient to demonstrate this truth, “that the constitution of England had arrived to its full vigour, and the true balance between liberty and prerogative was happily established by law, in the reign of king Charles the Second.”

It is far from my intention to palliate or defend many very iniquitous proceedings, contrary to all law, in that reign, through the artifice of wicked politicians, both in and out of employment. What seems incontestable is this: that by the law,(m) as it then stood, (notwithstanding some invidious, nay, dangerous, branches of the prerogative have since been lopped **440]off, and the rest more clearly defined,) the people had as large a portion of real liberty as is consistent with a state of society, and sufficient power, residing in their own hands, to assert and preserve that liberty if invaded by the royal prerogative. For which I need but appeal to the memorable catastrophe of the next reign. For when king Charles’s deluded brother attempted to enslave the nation, he found it was beyond his power: the people both could and did resist him, and, in consequence of such resistance, obliged him to quit his enterprise and his throne together. Which introduces us to the last period of our legal history.—viz.,

VI. From the revolution in 1688 to the present time. In this period many laws have passed, as the bill of rights, the toleration-act, the act of settlement with its conditions, the act for uniting England with Scotland, and some others: which have asserted our liberties in more clear and emphatical terms; have regulated the succession of the crown by parliament, as the exigencies of religious and civil freedom required; have confirmed and exemplified the doctrine of resistance when the executive magistrate endeavours to subvert the constitution; have maintained the superiority of the laws above the king, by pronouncing his dispensing power to be illegal; have indulged tender consciences with every religious liberty consistent with the safety of the state; have established triennial (since turned into septennial) elections of members to serve in parliament; have excluded certain officers from the house of commons; have restrained the king’s pardon from obstructing parliamentary impeachments; have imparted to all the lords an equal right of trying their fellow-peers; have regulated trials for high treason; have afforded our posterity a hope that corruption of blood may one day be abolished and forgotten; have (by the desire of his present majesty) set bounds to the civil list, and placed the administration of that revenue in hands that are accountable to parliament; and have (by the like desire) made the judges completely independent of the king, his ministers, and his successors. Yet, though these provisions have, in appearance and *[*441nominally, reduced the strength of the executive power to a much lower ebb than in the preceding period; if, on the other hand, we throw into the opposite scale (what perhaps the immoderate reduction of the antient prerogative may have rendered in some degree necessary) the vast acquisition of force arising from the riot-act and the annual expedience of a standing army, and the vast acquisition of personal attachment arising from the magnitude of the national debt, and the manner of levying those yearly millions that are appropriated to pay the interest; we shall find that the crown has, gradually and imperceptibly, gained almost as much in influence as it has apparently lost in prerogative.

The chief alterations of moment (for the time would fail me to descend to minutiæ) in the administration of private justice during this period are the solemn recognition of the law of nations with respect to the rights of ambassadors; the cutting off, by the statute for the amendment of the law, a vast number of excrescences that in process of time had sprung out of the practical part of it; the protection of corporate rights, by the improvements in writs of mandamus and informations in nature of quo warranto; the regulations of trials by jury, and the admitting witnesses for prisoners upon oath; the further restraints upon alienation of lands in mortmain; the annihilation of the terrible judgment of peine fort et dure; the extension of the benefit of clergy, by abolishing the pedantic criterion of reading; the counterbalance to this mercy, by the vast increase of capital punishment; the new and effectual methods for the speedy recovery of rents; the improvements which have been made in ejectments for the trying of titles; the introduction and establishment of papercredit, by endorsements upon bills and notes which have shown the legal possibility and convenience (which our ancestors so long doubted) of assigning a chose in action; the translation of all legal proceedings into the English language; the erection of courts of conscience for recovering small debts, and (which is much the better plan) the reformation of county courts; the great system of marine jurisprudence, of which the foundations have been laid, by clearly *[*442developing the principles on which policies of insurance are founded, and by happily applying those principles to particular cases; and, lastly, the liberality of sentiment which (though late) has now taken possession of our courts of common law and induced them to adopt (where facts can be clearly ascertained) the same principles of redress as have prevailed in our courts of equity from the time that lord Nottingham presided there; and this not only where specially empowered by particular statutes, (as in the case of bonds, mortgages, and set-offs,) but by extending the remedial influence of the equitable writ of trespass on the case, according to its primitive institution by king Edward the First, to almost every instance of injustice not remedied by any other process. And these, I think, are all the material alterations that have happened with respect to private justice in the course of the present century.

Thus, therefore, for the amusement and instruction of the student, I have endeavoured to delineate some rude outlines of a plan for the history of our laws and liberties, from their first rise and gradual progress among our British and Saxon ancestors till their total eclipse at the Norman conquest, from which they have gradually emerged and risen to the perfection they now enjoy at different periods of time. We have seen, in the course of our inquiries, in this and the former books, that the fundamental maxims and rules of the law, which regard the rights of persons, and the rights of things, the private injuries that may be offered to both, and the crimes which affect the public, have been and are every day improving, and are now fraught with the accumulated wisdom of ages; that the forms of administering justice came to perfection under Edward the First, and have not been much varied, nor always for the better, since; that our religious liberties were fully established at the reformation, but that the recovery of our civil and political liberties was a work of longer time, they not being thoroughly and completely regained till after the restoration of king Charles, nor fully and explicitly acknowledged and defined till the era of the happy revolution. Of a constitution so wisely contrived, **443]so strongly raised, and so highly finished, it is hard to speak with that praise which is justly and severely its due: the thorough and attentive contemplation of it will furnish its best panegyric. It hath been the endeavour of these commentaries, however the execution may have succeeded, to examine its solid foundations, to mark out its extensive plan, to explain the use and distribution of its parts, and, from the harmonious concurrence of those several parts, to demonstrate the elegant proportion of the whole. We have taken occasion to admire at every turn the noble monuments of ancient simplicity and the more curious refinements of modern art. Nor have its faults been concealed from view; for faults it has; lest we should be tempted to think it of more than human structure; defects chiefly arising from the decays of time or the rage of unskilful improvements in later ages. To sustain, to repair, to beautify, this noble pile, is a charge intrusted principally to the nobility and such gentlemen of the kingdom as are delegated by their country to parliament. The protection of the liberty of Britain is a duty which they owe to themselves, who enjoy it; to their ancestors, who transmitted it down; and to their posterity, who will claim at their hands this, the best birthright and noblest inheritance of mankind.4

[1 ] But this is now altered, by 9 Geo. IV. c. 31. See ante, p. 204.—Christian.

[(a) ] Hal. Hist. C. L. 62.

[(b) ] Hal. Hist. C. L. 57.

[(c) ] Ibid. 59.

[* ] Denied, 1 Spence, 61, n. See ante vol. 1, p. 65, n.

[(d) ] Mod. Un. Hist. xx. 114.

[2 ] See this controverted, ante, 2 book, p. 419.—Christian.

[(e) ] Spelm. Cod. LL. W. I. 283. Hen. I. 299.

[(f) ] Stat. Civ. Lond. 13 Edw. I.

[(g) ] Hal. Hist. C. L. 138.

[3 ] The following is the celebrated 29th chapter of magna carta, the foundation of the liberty of Englishmen:—

[(h) ] Hal. Hist. C. L. 156.

[(i) ] Ibid. 158.

[(k) ] Hal. Hist. C. L. 162.

[(l) ] See page 86.

[(m) ] The point of time at which I would choose to fix this theoretical perfection of our public law is in the year 1679, after the habeas corpus act was passed and that for licensing the press had expired, though the years which immediately followed it were times of great practical oppression.