Unquestionably our medieval law was open to humanistic attacks. It was couched partly in bad Latin, partly in worse French. For the business Latin of the middle age there is much to be said. It is a pleasant picture that which we have of Thomas More puzzling the omniscient foreigner by the question ‘An averia carucae capta in withernamio sunt irreplegibilia[38].’ He asked a practical question in the only Latin in which that question could have been asked without distortion. Smith’s acute glance saw that _withernamium_ must have something to do with the German _wiedernehmen_; for among his other pursuits our professor had interested himself in the study of English words[39]. But this business Latin was a pure and elegant language when compared with what served our lawyers as French. Pole and Smith might well call it barbarous; that it was fast becoming English was its one redeeming feature. You are likely to know what I must not call the classical passage: it comes from the seventeenth century. In all the _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_ there is nothing better than the report which tells how one of Sir Robert Rede’s successors was assaulted by a prisoner ‘que puis son condemnation ject un brickbat a le dit justice que narrowly mist[40].’ It is as instructive as it is surprising that this jargon should have been written in a country where Frenchmen had long been regarded as hereditary foes. This prepares us for the remark that taught law is tough law. But when ‘Dunce’ had been set in Bocardo (and it was a doctor of the civil law who set him there[41]), why should the old law books be spared? They also were barbarous; they also were sufficiently papistical.
Turning to a more serious aspect of affairs, it would not I think be difficult to show that the pathway for a Reception was prepared. Not difficult but perhaps wearisome. At this point it is impossible for us to forget that the year 1485, if important to students of English history for other reasons, is lamentably important for this reason, that there Dr Stubbs laid down his pen. In his power of marshalling legal details so as to bring to view some living principle or some phase of national development he has had no rival and no second among Englishmen. Howbeit, we may think of the subjected church and the humbled baronage, of the parliament which exists to register the royal edicts, of the English _Lex Regia_ which gives the force of statute to the king’s proclamations[42], of the undeniable faults of the common law, of its dilatory methods, of bribed and perjured juries, of the new courts which grow out of the King’s Council and adopt a summary procedure devised by legists and decretists. Might not the Council and the Star Chamber and the Court of Requests--courts not tied and bound by ancient formalism,--do the romanizing work that was done in Germany by the Imperial Chamber Court, the _Reichskammergericht_[43]? This was the time when King Henry’s nephew James V was establishing a new court in Scotland, a College of Justice, and Scotland was to be the scene of a Reception[44].