226 The Period ot Constitution MaJang
popular usage and custom, in contradistinction to statute
law. (c) More narrowly that part of the system just defined
which was recognised and administered by the king's justices
In contradistinction to the modifications introduced by the
chancellors as rules of equity in restraint or enlargement of
the customary and statutory law.1
Beside this, may be placed the history of the term. Com-
mon law first meant a law that was common to all Eng-
land, a law not for this or that county or borough. It
was thus used in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
It was next used in opposition to statute law, as the latter
developed during the fourteenth century; then, in opposi-
tion to equity when the Court of Chancery became im-
portant in the fifteen century. By that time, the concep-
tion of it as a body of law older than, and in important
ways distinguished from, two other bodies of law had
crowded out the original meaning of common. The first
of the present usages, just cited, seems to have come from
applying to the whole of England's law the name of its
most characteristic and historically important part. It is
an untechnical use, but serves to distinguish England's
law and legal history from those of other European coun-
tries.
Had no system of king's courts grown after the Norman
Conquest, the Anglo-Saxon law, administered in the local
courts, would, it is to be supposed, have continued to
develop. It seems, from what is known of continental
history, that from such a law, administered in courts so
isolated from one another, no law common to the whole
country could have grown. Without the common courts,
there could not have been the common law. Rather, the
differences, which existed among the localities when condi-
tions were primitive and the people fairly homogeneous,
would have become ever greater. The kind of law used in
* The Century Dictionary. This definition has been quoted in full to
make d^x the present, accepted usages, and to avoid explanations in the
course of the discussion.