English Law and the Renaissance; The Rede Lecture for 1901 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 edition. Excerpt: ... of Germany in which the law was least Roman and most Germanic. The division of France into two great districts was not equal: before the acquisition of Elsass from Germany 'les pays de droit ecrit comprenaient a peine les deux cinquiemes de la France1 (Planiol, op. cit, vol. I., p. 11). See the useful map in Brissaud, Histoire du droit francais, p. 152. Even in the south there was much customary law. A famous sentence in the custumal of Bordeaux placed'the written law' below 'natural reason' (Viollet, op. cit., p. 150). Still it is not to be denied that a slow process of romanization-- very different from the catastrophic Reception in Germany--went on steadily for some five or six centuries; and a system which as a whole seems very un-Roman to a student of what became ' the common law1 of Germany may rightly seem Roman to an Englishman. Francis Bacon knew that France could not be compendiously described as a country governed by the civil law. In his speech on the Union of Laws (Spedding, Life and Letters, vol. III., P- 337) ne accurately distinguishes 'Gascoigne, Languedock, Provence, Dolphinie' which are 'governed by the letter or text of the civil law' from 'the Isle of France, Tourayne, Berry, Anjou and the rest, and most of all Brittain and Normandy, ' which are 'governed by customs which amount unto a municipal law, and use the civil law but only for grounds and to decide new and rare cases.' English readers should at least know the doctrine, strongly advocated in modern Germany, that the private law which was developed in England by a French-speaking court was just one more French coutume. Sohm, Frankisches Recht und romisches Recht, p. 69: 'Die Vorgeschichte des englischen Rechts von heute hat nicht in England, sondern in...