240 The Period of Constitution Making
at the end of that law's rapid extension through new writs,
they formed a new starting point and laid down principles
upon which, with but little conscious creation, much new
law was based and elaborated. Especially was this the
case with land law. Such statutes as Mortmain, De
Donis Conditionalibus, and Quia Eniptores1 were funda-
mental.2 But such legislation was exceptional; in the
two following centuries, the common law was left to
elaborate itself, little important supplemental material
being furnished by Parliament. In the Tudor period,
important legislation began again and it has since steadily
increased in quantity. Hence it might seem that all
law-making power would finally pass to Parliament and
that the independence of the judicial system, with its
self-developing body of law, would end. But this has not
proved to be the case.
That the common law has been radically revolutionised by
statute on some subjects in very recent times, as, for example,
in real estate law, is not an evidence of the decline of this
self-developing power. It is rather due to the rapid and
revolutionary change in society itself, which demands equally
rapid and revolutionary change in the law to accompany it.
The statutes themselves are subjected at once to the ordinary
process of common-law development in the interpretation
and application of them made by the courts.3
Thus had England's common law—common law (in
the narrower sense), equity, and statutes—remained in-
1 These are also known as De Religiosis, Westminster the Second, and
Westminster the Third. See A. and S., documents 40, 42, 45.
3 " Blackstone, in order that he might expound the working of the law
in his own day in an intelligible fashion, was forced at every turn to take
back his readers to the middle ages, and even now, after all our reforms,
our courts are still from time to time compelled to construe statutes of
Edward I/s day, and were Parliament to repeal some of those statutes
and provide no substitute, the whole edifice of our land law would fall
down with a crash."—P. and M.f i., xxxiv.
*^ Adams, Civilisation during the Middle Ages, p. 100, note i. "In the
Hailed States, the existence of a written constitution as fundamental law
has led to^a most important and valuable extension of this principle in the
power which the courts have assumed, without express sanction, to declare
a law regularly passed by the national legislature unconstitutional and
therefore null and void/'—Ibid., p. 100.