feudal 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 king John first, and afterwards his son, consented to the two famous charters of English liberties, magna charta and carta de foresta. Of these, the latter was well calculated to redress many grievances and encroachments of the crown in the exercise of forest law; and the former confirmed many liberties of the church, and redressed many grievances incident to feudal tenures, of no small moment at the time, though now, unless considered attentively and with retrospect, they seem but of trifling concern. But besides these feudal 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 from the tyrannical abuse of the prerogative of purveyance and pre-emption. It fixed the forfeiture of lands for felony in the same manner as it still remains ; prohibited, for the future, 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 has ever since continued; and prohibited the appeals of women, unless for the death of their husbands. In matters of public police and national concern, it enjoined an uniformity of weights and measures; gave new encouragement to commerce, by the protection of foreign merchants; 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 by 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 freeholders, 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; prohibited 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-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, liberty, and property, unless the same should be declared forfeited by the judgment of his peers, or the law of the land. We beg to direct the attention of our readers to MAGNA CHARTA itself, a translation

of which we have given, page 33, with a few explanatory remarks preceding it.

By means of the rebellion of the barons, and the struggles in which the king and the nation were engaged, the pope contrived to gain a still greater ascendancy in England than he had ever enjoyed before, which continued through the long reign of his son Henry III., in the beginning of whose reign the old Saxon trial by ordeal was also totally abolished: and we may by this time perceive in Bracton's treatise, a still farther improvement in the method and regularity of the common law, especially in point of pleadings.* Nor must it be forgotten, that the first traces which remain of the separation of the greater barons from the less, in the constitution 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 English legal history.

III. The third period commences with the reign of Edward I., who has justly been styled the English Justinian; for, in his time, the law received so sudden a perfection, that Sir Matthew Hale does not scruple to affirm, that more was done in the first thirteen years of the reign of that monarch to settle and establish the distributive justice of the kingdom, than in all the ages since that put together, until Sir Matthew's own time. †

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 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 Hallam's History.

* Hallam's History, c. 156.

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 of more ancient date than the reign of his father; and those were by him collected. 9. He improved upon the laws of king Alfred, by the 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 eligit, which was of signal benefit to a trading people; and upon the same commercial ideas, he 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 closed the great gulf in which all the landed property in 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, modern times have entertained a very different opinion. 15. He reduced all Wales, not only to the subjection of the crown, but, in a great measure, to the laws of England (which was thoroughly completed in the reign of Henry VIII.), and he seems to have entertained the same design on Scotland, so as to have formed an entire and complete union of the island of Great Britain.

This catalogue might be continued much farther; but, on 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; 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 has occasioned.* The forms of writ 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, nor 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 charta, rather than from its making or renewal in the days

*Hallam's History.

of his grandfather and father, that the liberty of Englishmen began again to rear its head; though the weight of the military tenures hung heavily upon it for many ages afterwards.

A better proof of the excellence of his institutions cannot be given, than that from this time to that of Henry VIII., there happened very few alterations in the legal forms of procedures, and these but very inconsider able. 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 II. and Edward III., and, instead of the latter, justices of the peace were established. Also, in the reign of Edward III. 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 the wearing of foreign cloths and 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 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 ordinary's officers, to uses then denominated pious. The statutes also of præmunire for effectually depressing the pope's civil power, 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 (or monkish) clergy.

From this time to that of Henry VIII., the civil wars and disputed titles to the crown, gave no leisure for further juridical improvements; 66 ?m silent leges inter arma.” And yet it is to these very disputes and usurpations that we owe the happy loss of all the dominions of the crown in France, which had the beneficial effect of turning the minds of 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 Romish clergy, to evade the statutes of mortmain, but introduced under Edward IV. 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 popish inventions.

In the reign of Henry VII., his ministers, if not 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 both 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 aliene. 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, after such outlawry, the goods became the property of the crown. In short, there is hardly a statute in this reign, introductive of a new 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 the legal history of England, viz. the Reformation of religion under Henry VIII. and his children, which, in ecclesiastical matters, opens up an entirely new scene: the usurped power of the pope being now, it is devoutly to be hoped, routed and destroyed (unless the Roman Catholic relief bill of 1829 may pave the way for his encroachments), all his connexions with this island cut off, the crown restored to its supremacy over the clergy and their causes, and the patronage of bishoprics being once more indisputably vested in the king. And if at this time the spiritual courts had been re-united to the civil, we should have seen the old Saxon constitution, with regard to 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 allowing the devise of real estates by will, which

*See Art. Supremacy of the Crown.