Law Courts 229
cerning the Laws and Customs of England. It was written
about the middle of the thirteenth century, and is by far
the most important law-book which appeared in England
in the middle ages. It owes much more to Roman law
than GlanviUe's work, about one-fifteenth of it being
borrowed from the Summa of Azo, "a legist who stood at
the head of the Bolognese school of law early in the thir-
teenth century." There was also much that was Roman
in Bracton's arrangement. But with the exception stated,
the law that Bracton gives is English. It is not theoreti-
cal, an ideal system; but emphatically the law of his time,
the law that had been made by adjudged cases, and the
cases that he cites are many. * Just as this work appeared,
the forces tending to fix the common law were making
themselves felt. Although, like Glanville's, this was a
private undertaking, it hardly needs to be said that such
a comprehensive and sympathetic statement of English
law coming at that time became an authority of the highest
influence.
An epoch in legal history was closing with Bracton. A
new system of courts, with appropriate law and procedure,
had been made; borrowing from the Roman law, at least
for a long time to come, was at an end; the making of new
writs, that is, new forms of action* was no longer easy;
there was a system of legal forms.2 One is, at first, sur-
prised that a law and procedure so young and mobile under
Henry II. should have grown old and rigid in his grand-
son's reign. The truth seems to be that the time was too
r About two thousand such citations are found in the famous "note
book" which in all probability was the work of Bracton. It has passed
under the name of Bracton9s Note Book and contains transcripts from the
rolls kept by the Bench, the court held coram rege, and the itinerant
justices.
2 This system resembles the Roman formulary system, especially in the
way it grew, 4>ut was not derived from it. It could not have been, for the
lawyers of this time were interested, if at all, in the finished product of
Roman law, the Justinian Code, not in the history of that law; they prob-
ably did not know it had passed through an evolution analogous to that
through which English law was passing. "Edward I. has been called 'the
English Justinian.' The suggested comparison is not very happy; it is
something like a comparison between childhood and second childhood."
Maitland, C. H. E., p. 18.