66 AGRICULTURE. 



an island. Such metamorphoses are appropriately noticed 

 by Ovid in a passage beginning 



" Vidi ego quod fuerat quondam solidissima tellus 

 Esse fretum, vidi factas ex sequore terras"- 



and they are largely spoken of by Amm. Marcellinus and 

 other ancient writers. Dugdale and his predecessors im- 

 pute these changes to earthquakes, between which opinion 

 and the modern theory of alternate subsidence and eleva- 

 tion, we must leave the Dean of York to decide. 



The legal details in Dugdale 's work are infinitely tedious. 

 Still they present several points worthy of observation, 

 and give evidence of an equal administration of justice in 

 very early times of our history. We find, almost invari- 

 ably, a performance of its public duties enforced on pro- 

 perty, and local jobbing repressed with a firm hand. Our 

 author, rejecting the Britons as barbarous, and the Saxons 

 as illiterate, fixes on the Romans as the first who reco- 

 vered lands by banking out the sea in England, fortifying 

 himself by a fanciful interpretation of a passage in " the 

 famous Tacitus, an author of that time." On the autho- 

 rity of monastic records he declares a marsh-land common 

 law, administered by twenty-four elective jurats, to have 

 been in existence A.D. 796, and to have been then desig- 

 nated in " unquestionable documents," as " antiquas et 

 approbatas consuetudines." The most important power of 

 the jurats was that of levying a rate, and distraining for 

 non-payment, for which distress, in case of imminent 

 common danger, there was no replevy, " quia necessitas 

 defensionis tails inopinata, si venerit, legi communi vel 

 justitice subesse non poterit." But in 35th Hen. III., the 

 sheriff of Kent, on a threatened irruption of the sea into 

 Rornney Marsh, replevied the distresses. The king in- 

 stantly issued his writ and letters patent restraining the 

 sheriff, and, in consequence of "the controversies risen 

 between the jurats and the marshmen," he sent down 

 " Henry de Batho, a famous justice itinerant of that time, 

 to hear and determine them." 



