sometimes for the alienees or assigns.1 In each phase some slavish accompaniment was fixed upon, such as fines, reliefs, and other exactions, under the pretence of obtaining the lord's consent or sanction to everything which the vassal did. The habit of dictation on the one hand, and obedience on the other, engendered by so close a connection in barbarous times, soon produced its natural fruit; and the stronger party gradually imposed on the weaker party more and more conditions and services, and these more or less oppressive to the vassal, so that the irksomeness of the whole soon began to be felt and complained of during the three first reigns of the Conquest. This in turn, however, was not unaccompanied by some compensating advantage, for it led Henry I. to promise a restoration of the laws of Edward the Confessor, and to grant a charter, which was the foundation of that celebrated Magna Charta extorted at Runnymede from John and confirmed by Henry III., and which marked so important an epoch in the law. The mutuality of feudal services accustomed kings to consult with their chief subjects. It was especially fortunate for England that the feudal laws fostered a spirit of turbulence and self-reliance in the crown vassals. Hallam says it diffused a spirit of liberty, and Guizot describes it thus: "Feudalism did a great service to humanity by exhibiting a continual example of individual will developing itself in all its energy." "3 In England it was said wardship and marriage, the two harshest incidents, were more prevalent than in other countries.

2

The vice of the feudal tenure appears on the surface of its ordinary working. If I bought or hired a piece of land from a man, why should I be so linked to his destiny and share in all his joys and sorrows so intimately, that when his son was to be knighted or his daughter to be married I must pay him large sums; if he was put in prison, why was I to ransom him? If I died or sold the land, why should my son, or my alienee pay him a large bounty in

1 GUIZOT says it is a common mistake, which the "Book of Feuds" shares, that at first the vassal's interest was always precarious, and then advanced slowly stage by stage, first to a fixed term, then to interest for life, then for the heirs and assigns. He says all these forms flourished together, and contemporaneously from first to last. -3 Guizot, Fr. Civ. Lect. 2.

* 1 Hallam, Mid. Ag. 268.

3 Guizot, Eur. Civ. Lect. 7.

the form of a relief or fine? and why should my best horse or jewel belong to him? If I committed a crime, why should my land be confiscated by him? If I left an infant heir, why should he insist on being the guardian, and reaping the profits, and finding that heir a wife; and if I left an infant heiress, why should he insist on her marrying one of three persons he chose to name, otherwise to pay him a large sum to be off the bargain? All these consequences were so utterly illogical and incoherent, that nothing but the mailed hand and nomadic life and rough rapacious habits of the camp could so long have perpetuated them.

Abuse and decay of that law.-The ultimate effect of the feudal system was to make it impossible for any subject to concentrate in himself the entire rights relating to his land and enjoy absolute property, for as he always held of some lord, this dependence in reality required the entire ownership to be split up into portions which complicated the title. For though one might have the substantial right or dominium utile, yet the incidents attaching to the lordship or superior right detracted from its value, and so interfered with and crippled the absolute ownership as sometimes to create a forfeiture or total annihilation of the vassal's interest, and at all times he felt himself oppressed with vexatious and irrelevant exactions.1 After centuries of growing abuses arising out of feudal tenures it was at length seen that there was not in reality, and ought not to be, any logical connection between the lord and the vassal sufficient to constitute this compulsory and intimate partnership between them in the land, for by doing so the benefits were all on one partner and the burdens all on the other, and complication and confusion beset both. Each individual ought to be able to enjoy the full and absolute rights of property which the law allows, independent of the acts or incidents of third persons, and it was chiefly owing to this change in the views of society that the most preposterous of the feudal characteristics were totally abolished in the reign of Charles II., and a gradual disposition has ever since grown up to convert copyhold and other tenures, the outstanding relics of feudalism, into freehold. tenure, that is to say, into an absolute and undivided

1 The feudal system declined in England very rapidly from the time of Edward I.—3 Haliam, Mid. Ag. 165.

ownership. This species of ownership is the only sound arrangement compatible with a state of society in which slavery is no longer tolerated or acknowledged, and in which business is sought to be facilitated, and free play allowed to the varied operations of commerce.1

The civil law, what.—It is necessary to advert to several significations given to the words "civil law." The first meaning is that which puts it in contrast to such phrases as criminal law, military law, ecclesiastical law. The other more limited and special meaning is that which denotes the Roman law, or the municipal law of the Roman Empire. The division of the law into criminal and civil has already been adverted to, and it was shown that, though it was not so substantial a division as to be adopted in any systematic exposition of the whole law, yet it was a popular and convenient mode of separating the treatment of rights according as the violations of law were slight or grave.

Sometimes also the expressions military and naval law are used in contrast to civil law, as separating those peculiar laws which regulate the military and naval professions. This distinction is obviously one of mere convenience, and indicates no fundamental principle. Again, the phrase " ecclesiastical law" is in like manner used in contradistinction to civil law, as indicating those laws which peculiarly relate to the Church and the clergy, the rest of the law being in that view described as civil law. These ecclesiastical laws, as already pointed out, fall under

1 The feudal law is the delight of antiquaries, and Spelman marvelled that my Lord Coke had not turned into so fruitful a field.— Spelm. Orig. of Terms, ch. viii.

MONTESQUIEU admired the feudal system, and compared it to an old and majestic oak. BENTHAM compared it to that fatal tree the manchineel, whose juices are poisons to man, and whose shade is destructive to vegetation.-Bentham's Princ. of Civ. Code, ch. vi.

J. S. MILL says the feudal law possessed a certain degree of suitableness to the wants of the society among whom it grew up, but advancing civilisation heaped law upon law over it like strata in the physical world, and “ every struggle in the disjointed condition of the part of the field of law which covers the spot, nay, the very traps and pitfalls which one contending party set for another, are still standing, and the teeth, not of hyenas only, but of foxes and all cunning animals, are imprinted on the curious remains found in these antediluvian caves.'

the important division of the law, entituled "Security of Public Worship.”

The Roman law, called the civil law.-The civil law, or the Roman law, was the most elaborate system of municipal law which had held a conspicuous place in the world, until the middle ages slowly developed the laws of modern nations, which contained many new views and settlements unknown to the ancients, and which now, having been matured, have almost entirely cut off the modern from the ancient polity. Justinian's collection of the Roman law was completed by Tribonian and other lawyers about the year 534, and was current in the eastern portion of the empire. In the western part of the Roman Empire there had previously been an attempt also to consolidate the immense mass of laws then current. Two private lawyers, supposed to have lived in the reign of Constantine, had made collections with that view, called the Gregorian and Hermogenian codes, and the Emperor Theodosius the Younger directed a code of imperial constitutions to be compiled about the year 438, then and thereafter known as the Theodosian code. But when the civil, or Roman, law is referred to, it is the body of law bearing the name of Justinian which occupies the leading place.

The body of law called by the name of Justinian began with the code published in 529, and revised in 534, and the digests or pandects in 534. Of these digests, which were loosely arranged, the extracts from Ulpian constituted about one-third of the work, from Paulus a sixth, and from Papinian a twelfth. The Institutes accompanied the digests as an introduction founded on the commentaries of Gaius and others. Lastly, the novels, or new constitutions were published soon after Justinian's death, which occurred in 565. Justinian's body of law was after 300 years replaced by the Basilica of Leo, which was republished in 945. The Basilica, with some new constitutions of the later emperors, still held favour at Constantinople when the Turks, in 1453, extinguished the Eastern Empire and its law. In the Western Empire Justinian's laws had been little known, but the study became more prominent at Bologna in the twelfth century.1

1 Savigny pointed out the mistake long current, that the discovery of the copy of the Pandects at the siege of Amalfi, in 1135, was the

The Commentaries of Gaius, the earliest institutional writer who flourished in the time of the Antonines, were imperfectly known till a copy was accidentally discovered in 1816 by Niebuhr, and published in 1820, and this has added much to the interest of this branch of legal study.

Its importance and application in England.--The Roman law will always command the attentive study of all who desire to be assisted by the ripe experience of generations of the jurists of a great and powerful empire, which long held sway over great varieties of tribes and nations. Much of the art of governing mankind, and the art of putting difficulties in train for a solution, is common to all countries, and as the phraseology used by that law has long been current, and been absorbed into all modern languages, and moreover as large portions of that law have been bodily appropriated, or at least adopted with very little variations by several modern countries, the utility of such a study is obvious, and is not so visionary as many practical men represent. In England in modern times the chief sources of interest lie in the law of contracts and the law of servitudes, and the courts of this country have gladly borrowed a ready-made solution for difficulties, which no recognised rule of their own clearly provided for, by resorting to the storehouse of precedents accepted and acted upon in those departments of the civil law.i

Though the Roman law has no intrinsic authority in

means of first diffusing a knowledge of that part of the Roman law, as other copies were studied before that date.-1 Hallam, Const. H. 63; 2 Guizot, Civ. Fr. Lect. 11.

At certain epochs the tenets of the civil law fascinated ruder minds, and we are told that at Florence the copy of the civil law was deposited as a sacred relic in a rich casket, bound in purple, and exhibited to travellers by monks and magistrates bareheaded, and with lighted tapers, as if it had been a divine revelation.-Brenckman, b. i. ch. x.

1 SAVIGNY:"Our admiration of the Roman law is almost entirely confined to its theory of contracts. The remainder of this law might have been discovered by plain good sense, without any juridical cultivation, and for so slight a gain it is not worth while to invoke the laws and lawyers of two thousand years to help us."— Savigny, Voc. of the Age (tr. by Hayward), 43.

FABER and HOTTOMAN (1610) opposed the study of the Roman law as full of obsolete doctrines, which gave no assistance to modern lawyers in matters of daily occurrence. HOTTOMAN said not one