OF ENGLISH LIBERTY. 11 



individual before the bar of a certain number of peers, that is, of men 

 of his own condition, occupying the same rank as himself in society. 

 The promulgation of the feudal system changed that state of affairs 

 only in so far as to convert the right of the people into that of the 

 court ; and while it was formerly required that the judges should share 

 with the accused an equality in social rank and condition, it was now 

 requisite that that quality should chiefly refer to the conditions of that 

 species of service which they were called on to perform for the benefit 

 of the crown. But the chief and essential changes which the law in 

 itself underwent, were mainly attributable to the reforms which took 

 place among the mass of the people, generating in external circum- 

 stances and the spirit of the age, and particularly through the exer- 

 tions of the ecclesiastics, partly by alienating those customs which 

 were originally simple and intelligible to all the members of society 

 at large, from the common comprehension of the people, by investing 

 them with a sort of scientific mist and accompanying jargon, and sub- 

 jecting them to a sort of systematic study far beyond the understand- 

 ing of the populace, who henceforth scarcely knew the meaning of the 

 new forms and terms which had been introduced ; and partly, and 

 chiefly, by actually suppressing those popular customs in favour of 

 the more scientific Roman law, the revival of which suited better the 

 tastes and interests of those dignitaries. 



Until the Norman conquest, the duties of judges and lawyers had 

 devolved upon the Saxon monks, who studied and taught in the clois- 

 ters. At this period the foreign ambassadors introduced among their 

 retinue the first civilians into England. Thobald, Archbishop of Can- 

 terbury, imported several of this order, and among them Roger Va- 

 carioces, the first teacher of the Roman law at Oxford. The laymen 

 here, as in other parts of England, protested at first against the new 

 law, and King Stephen, who was anxious to reconcile the people to his 

 usurpation of the crown by conciliatory measures, interdicted the Ro- 

 man law. At the assembly at Merton, where the clergy moved the 

 sanction of the Roman law by which illegitimate children may become 

 legitimate after the marriage of their parents, the barons declared pos- 

 itively that the customary laws of the country should not be in the least 

 infringed or changed ; and a hundred years afterwards the parlia- 

 ment manifested the same spirit, and repeated the same bold declara- 

 tion, adding that " England shall never be ruled by foreign laws." 

 In this instance the clergy might, as in most others, have prevailed, 

 but for their own imprudence. In this affair, their wonted patience 

 and perseverance forsook them ; believing themselves to be entirely indis- 



