A PROPOSAL FOR AMENDING 



the consciences, estates, and fortunes of particular 

 persons : but this of general ordinance pricketh not 

 particulars, but passeth &quot; sine strepitu.&quot; Besides, it is 

 on the favourable part ; for it easeth, it presseth not : 

 and lastly, it is rather matter of order and expla 

 nation than of alteration. Neither is this without 

 precedent in former governments. 



The Romans, by their Decemvirs, did make their 

 twelve tables ; but that was indeed a new enacting 

 or constituting of laws, not a registering or recom 

 piling ; and they were made out of the laws of the 

 Grecians, not out of their own customs. 



In Athens they had Sexviri, which were 

 standing commissioners to watch and to discern 

 what laws waxed improper for the time ; and what 

 new law did, in any branch, cross a former law, and 

 so &quot; ex offlcio,&quot; propounded their repeals. 



King Lewis XI. of France, had it in his intention 

 to have made one perfect and uniform law, out of 

 the civil law Roman, and the provisional customs of 

 France. 



Justinian the Emperor, by commission directed 

 to divers persons learned in the laws, reduced the 

 Roman laws from vastness of volume, and a laby 

 rinth of uncertainties, unto that course of the civil 

 law which is now in use. I find here at home of 

 late years, that King Henry VIII. in the twenty- 

 seventh of his reign was authorised by parliament to 

 nominate thirty-two commissioners, part ecclesias 

 tical, part temporal, to purge the canon law, and to 

 make it agreeable to the law of God, and the law of 



