the English people The clauses we have quoted just before, need no comment to show how sturdily the spirit of liberty strode abroad even at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century. for Magna Charta was signed in 1215. The rest of the century was to see great advances in liberty and human rights, even beyond the guarantees of the Great Charter.

Magna Charta, glorious as it was, was only the beginning of that basic legislation which was to distinguish the Thirteenth Century in England. About the middle of the century Bracton began his collection of the laws of the land which has since been the great English classic of the Common Law. His work was accomplished while he was the Chief Justiciary during the reign of Henry III. For many years before he had occupied various judicial positions, as Justice Itinerant of the counties of Nottingham and Derby and for seventeen years his name appears as one of the justices of the Aula Regis. This experience put him in an eminently fitting position to be the mouthpiece of English practice and law applications, and his book was at once accepted as an authority. It is a most comprehensive and systematic work in five volumes, bearing the title De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, and was modeled after the Institutes of Justinian.

It was during the reign of Edward I., the English Justinian as he has been called, that the English Common Law came to its supreme expression, and this monarch has rightly been placed among the great benefactors of mankind for his magnanimous generosity in securing the legal rights of his subjects and framing English liberties for all time. Not a little of Edward's greatness as a law-maker and his readiness to recognize the rights of his subjects, with his consequent willingness to have English law arranged and published, must be attributed to his connection during his earlier years as Prince of Wales with the famous Simon De Montfort. To this man more than to any other the English speaking people owe the development of those constitutional rights, which gradually came to be considered inalienably theirs during the Thirteenth Century. He is undoubtedly one of the very great characters of history and the Thirteenth Century is by so much greater for having been the scene of his labors, during so many years, for the

establishment of constitutional limitations to the power of the monarch, and the uplifting of the rights of subjects not only among the nobility, but also among the lower classes.

It was in Edward's time that the English Common Law was fashioned into the shape in which it was to exist for many centuries afterwards. How true this is may perhaps best be judged by the fact that even the laws with regard to real estate have not been changed in essence since that time, though medieval titles to land would seem to be so different to those of the present day. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica the changes which have been made since that time have been mainly due to the action of equity and legislation, the latter sometimes interpreted by the courts in a manner very different from the intention of Parliament. The same authority is responsible for the statement that the reign of Edward I., is notable for three leading real estate statutes which are still law. One of these was with regard to Mortmain, while the important statute known as Quia Emptores (the eighteenth of Chapter I. of the Laws of Edward I.) had the practical effect of making the transfer of land thenceforward, more of a commercial and less of a legal transaction. It is to this same period that is owed the writ Elegit which introduced the law practice of a creditor's remedy over real estate. How little was accomplished in the matter of law-making in subsequent centuries, may be gathered from the fact that Mr. James Williams who writes the article on real estate in the Encyclopedia Britannica ninth edition, says that from 1290 to the reign of Henry VIII., that is down to the Sixteenth Century, there is no statute of the first importance dealing with real estate.

In a word, then, it may be said that these law-makers of the Thirteenth Century anticipated most of the legal difficulties of the after-time. Their statutory provisions, as in the case of the chapters of Magna Charta, seemed originally only to have a narrow application to certain urgent legal questions of the time, but proved eventually to contain in themselves the essence of legal principles that could be applied in circumstances such as the original law-maker had not even imagined. This is indeed the typical triumph of the century in every line of endeavor, that while apparently it devoted itself only to the nar

row problems of its own time, its solutions of them whether in art and architecture or decoration, in literary expression or poetic effectiveness, in educational methods or social uplift, always proved so complete, so thoroughly human in the broadest sense of that word and so consonant with development, that their work did not have to be done over again. No greater praise than this could be bestowed.

XXIII

JUSTICE AND LEGAL DEVELOPMENT.

It must not be thought because we have devoted so much time to the triumphs of English law-making in the Thirteenth Century that, therefore, there is little or nothing to be said about this same admirable feature of the time in other countries. As a matter of fact every nation in Europe saw the foundation of its modern legal system laid, and was responsive witness to the expression of the first principles of popular rights and popular liberties. Montalembert in his Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary* makes no mention in the Introduction which is really a panegyric of the Thirteenth Century, of the progress of English law-making, and yet considers that he is able to bring together enough evidence to show that legislation had its acme of development just at this time. His paragraph on the subject will serve as the best possible preface to the scant treatment of continental law-making and enforcement of justice in this period, that our limited space will allow. He

says:

"Legislation never, perhaps, had a more illustrious period. On the one hand, the Popes, supreme authorities in matters of law as well as of faith, gave to canon law the fullest development possible to this magnificent security of Christian civilization; sat themselves as judges with exemplary assiduity, published immense collections, and founded numerous schools. On the other hand, that period gave birth to most of the national legislation of the varicus states of Europe; the great Mirrors of Swabia and Saxony, the first laws published in the German language by Frederick II. at the diet of Mentz, and the code given by him to Sicily; in France, the Institutes of St. Louis, together with the Common Law of Pierre des Fon

*Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary by the Count De Montalembert, translated by Francis Deming Hoyt, New York, Longman's, Green and Company, 1904.

taines, and the Statutes of Beauvoisis of Philip of Beaumanoir; and lastly the French version of the Assizes of Jerusalem, in which is to be found the most complete résumé now extant of Christian and chivalric law. All these precious monuments of the old Christian organization of the world are preserved in the native languages of the various people, and are distinguished less even by this fact than by their generous and pious spirit, from that pernicious Roman law, the progress of which was destined soon to change all the principles of the former."

Most of Montalembert's paragraph refers to the law-making in France with which he is naturally more familiar. He has supplied ample material for consultation for those who wish to follow out this interesting theme further. Even more significant, however, than the law-making in France, were the new ideas with regard to the enforcement in law that came in during the reign of Louis IX. We have not had to wait until this generation to realize, that as a rule it is not the absence of law so much as the lack of enforcement of such laws as exist, that gives rise to many of the injustices between men. St. Louis made it his business to bring about the enforcement of the laws with proper construction of their terms in such a way as to secure the rights of all. He himself sat under the famous old oak of Versailles as a Court of Appeals, reviewing especially the cases of the poor. It soon came to be known, that it would be a sad occasion for any and every court official who was found to have given judgment against the poor because of partiality or the yielding to unlawful influence. On the other hand, in order to keep the right of appeal from being abused, punishments were meted out to those who made appeals without good reason,

Finding that he was unable to hear so many causes as were appealed to him, Louis chose Stephen Boileau to act as Chief Justice and committed the care of proper legal enforcement with confidence into his hands. Boileau had become famous by having condemned some very near relatives, under circumstances such that relationship might have been expected to weigh down the wrong side of the scales of justice, and in a few years he enhanced his reputation by the utter disregard of all motives in the settlement of suits at law, except those of