[though omitted in that of Henry the third; 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 period 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, 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 (p).

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 they might not interfere with each other's proper business, to do which they were afterwards obliged to have recourse to fictions. 4. He settled the boundaries of the inferior courts, 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 were afterwards 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 com

(p) Hale, Hist. C. L. 158.

[mon 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 itself was of Saxon original. 8. He first established a repository for the public records of the kingdom, few of which are more antient 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 feudal 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. 14. He established a new limitation of property by the creation of estates tail: concerning the good policy of which, however, in the strict shape at least that originally belonged to them, modern times have 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—an improvement which has been since thoroughly completed; and he 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.

This catalogue might be continued 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 (q); 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 (r) 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 Charta, 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.

A better proof cannot be given of the excellence of his constitution, 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 conservators of the peace, were taken from the people in the reigns of Edward the second and Edward the third; 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 (9) Hale, Hist. C. L. 162.

(r) As to these, see Hist. Eng. Law, by Reeves, vol. ii. p. 280, &c.

[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 juridical 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 sub

To these

[sequent princes entirely to domestic concerns. 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 Star Chamber 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, introductive of a new law or modifying the old, but what