The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I. Frederic William Maitland

beginnings of ecclesiastical law.Dangers lay ahead. We notice one in a humble quarter. Certain religious societies, congregations (ecclesiae) of non-conformists, have been developing law, internal law, with ominous rapidity. We have called it law, and law it was going to be, but as yet it was, if the phrase be tolerable, unlawful law, for these societies had an illegal, a criminal purpose. Spasmodically the imperial law was enforced against them; at other times the utmost that they could hope for from the state was that in the guise of “benefit and burial societies” they would obtain some protection for their communal property.⁷ But internally they were developing what was to be a system of constitutional and governmental law, which would endow the overseer (episcopus) of every congregation with manifold powers. Also they were developing a system of punitive law, for the offender might be excluded from all participation in religious rites, if not from worldly intercourse with the faithful.⁸ Moreover, these various communities were becoming united by bonds that were too close to be federal. In particular, that one of them which had its seat in the capital city of the empire was winning a preeminence for itself and its overseer.⁹ Long indeed would it be before this overseer of a non-conformist congregation would, in the person of his successor, place his heel upon the neck of the prostrate Augustus by virtue of God-made law. This was not to be foreseen; but already a merely human jurisprudence was losing its interest. The intellectual force which some years earlier might have taken a side in the debate between Sabinians and Proculians now invented or refuted a christological heresy. Ulpian’s priesthood¹⁰ was not priestly enough.¹¹

THIRD CENTURY. Decline of Roman law.The decline was rapid. Long before the year 300 jurisprudence, the one science of the Romans, was stricken with sterility;¹² it was sharing the fate of art.¹³ Its eyes were turned backwards to the departed great. The constitutions of the emperors now appeared as the only active source of law. They were a disordered mass, to be collected rather than digested. Collections of them were being unofficially made: the Codex Gregorianus, the Codex Hermogenianus. These have perished; they were made, some say, in the Orient.¹⁴ The shifting eastward of the imperial centre and the tendency of the world to fall into two halves were not for the good of the West. Under one title and another, as coloni, laeti, gentiles, large bodies of untamed Germans were taking up their abode within the limit of the empire.¹⁵ The Roman armies were becoming barbarous hosts. Constantine owed his crown to an Alamannian king.¹⁶

FOURTH CENTURY. Church and State.It is on a changed world that we look in the year 400. After one last flare of persecution (303), Christianity became a lawful religion (313). In a few years it, or rather one species of it, had become the only lawful religion. The “confessor” of yesterday was the persecutor of to-day. Heathenry, it is true, died hard in the West; but already about 350 a pagan sacrifice was by the letter of the law a capital crime.¹⁷ Before the end of the century cruel statutes were being made against heretics of all sorts and kinds.¹⁸ No sooner was the new faith lawful, than the state was compelled to take part in the multifarious quarrels of the Christians. Hardly had Constantine issued the edict of tolerance, than he was summoning the bishops to Arles (314), even from remote Britain, that they might, if this were possible, make peace in the church of Africa.¹⁹ In the history of law, as well as in the history of dogma, the fourth century is the century of ecclesiastical councils. Into the debates of the spiritual parliaments of the empire²⁰ go whatever juristic ability, and whatever power of organization are left among mankind. The new supernatural jurisprudence was finding another mode of utterance; the Bishop of Rome was becoming a legislator, perhaps a more important legislator than the emperor.²¹ In 380 Theodosius himself commanded that all the peoples which owned his sway should follow, not merely the religion that Christ had delivered to the world, but the religion that St. Peter had delivered to the Romans.²² For a disciplinary jurisdiction over clergy and laity the state now left a large room wherein the bishops ruled.²³ As arbitrators in purely secular disputes they were active; it is even probable that for a short while under Constantine one litigant might force his adversary unwillingly to seek the episcopal tribunal.²⁴ It was necessary for the state to protest that criminal jurisdiction was still in its hands.²⁵ Soon the church was demanding, and in the West it might successfully demand, independence of the state and even a dominance over the state: the church may command and the state must obey.²⁶ If from one point of view we see this as a triumph of anarchy, from another it appears as a triumph of law, of jurisprudence. Theology itself must become jurisprudence, albeit jurisprudence of a supernatural sort, in order that it may rule the world.

FIFTH CENTURY. The Theodosian Code.Among the gigantic events of the fifth century the issue of a statute-book seems small. Nevertheless, through the turmoil we see two statute-books, that of Theodosius II. and that of Euric the West Goth. The Theodosian Code was an official collection of imperial statutes beginning with those of Constantine I. It was issued in 438 with the consent of Valentinian III. who was reigning in the West. No perfect copy of it has reached us.²⁷ This by itself would tell a sad tale; but we remember how rapidly the empire was being torn in shreds. Already Britain was abandoned (407). We may doubt whether the statute-book of Theodosius ever reached our shores until it had been edited by Jacques Godefroi.²⁸ Indeed we may say that the fall of a loose stone in Britain brought the crumbling edifice to the ground.²⁹ Already before this code was published the hordes of Alans, Vandals and Sueves had swept across Gaul and Spain; already the Vandals were in Africa. Already Rome had been sacked by the West Goths; they were founding a kingdom in southern Gaul and were soon to have a statute-book of their own. Gaiseric was not far off, nor Attila. Also let us remember that this Theodosian Code was by no means well designed if it was to perpetuate the memory of Roman civil science in that stormy age. It was no “code” in our modern sense of that term. It was only a more or less methodic collection of modern statutes. Also it contained many things that the barbarians had better not have read; bloody laws against heretics, for example.

Laws of Euric.We turn from it to the first monument of Germanic law that has come down to us. It consists of some fragments of what must have been a large law-book published by Euric for his West Goths, perhaps between 470 and 475.³⁰ Euric was a conquering king; he ruled Spain and a large part of southern Gaul; he had cast off, so it is said, even the pretence of ruling in the emperor’s name. Nevertheless, his laws are not nearly so barbarous as our curiosity might wish them to be. These West Goths who had wandered across Europe were veneered by Roman civilization. It did them little good. Their later law-books, that of Reckessuinth (652–72), that of Erwig (682), that of Egica (687–701) are said to be verbose and futile imitations of Roman codes. But Euric’s laws are sufficient to remind us that the order of date among these Leges Barbarorum is very different from the order of barbarity. Scandinavian laws that are not written until the thirteenth century will often give us what is more archaic than anything that comes from the Gaul of the fifth or the Britain of the seventh. And, on the other hand, the mention of Goths in Spain should remind us of those wondrous folk-wanderings and of their strange influence upon the legal map of Europe. The Saxon of England has a close cousin in the Lombard of Italy, and modern critics profess that they can see a specially near kinship between Spanish and Icelandic law.³¹

SIXTH CENTURY. The century of Justinian.In legal history the sixth century is the century of Justinian. But, in the west of Europe this age appears as his, only if we take into account what was then a remote future. How powerless he was to legislate for many of the lands and races whence he drew his grandiose titles— Alamannicus, Gothicus, Francicus and the rest—we shall see if we inquire who else had been publishing laws. The barbarians had been writing down their customs. The barbarian kings had been issuing law-books for their Roman subjects. Books of ecclesiastical law, of conciliar and papal law, were being compiled.³²