Law Courts 231
the law from theoretical flights which might have borne
it away from the domain of the practical and serviceable.
The law never escaped from the people; they were making
their law or keeping It from being made. No absolutism
was running the people into the mould of a foreign, or
theoretically perfect, law. On the contrary, the law has
reflected all the peculiarities and conservatisms of the
English people at any given time. This went far to make
it Ineradicable; the people could not get along without It
because it was a part of them.
Another agency that helped make the English common
law permanent had its origin at just the time the law was
completing Its period of rapid growth. The great English
law schools, the Inns of Court, are first dimly about
the end of the thirteenth century. They became thor-
oughly established in the reigns of Edward III. and
Richard IL It is an interesting fact that the common law
did not find Its home in the universities. There the
ground had been taken by the civil and canon laws, and
the teaching of these had become so identified with uni-
versity work that when there was an English law to teach
it seemed an unnatural thing to give It a place beside
them.1 No one consciously founded the law schools;
they grew out of the needs of the time which determined
their location and most else about them.
In the first half of the thirteenth century. It was be-
coming evident that English justices would soon cease to
be drawn from the clergy. The spirit of this period of
papal power and church unity was to keep the clergy from
taking part In lay affairs. If they touched such things, It
should be as masters, not participants. It was especially
unseemly for bishops to sit on the bench and dispense a
1" The voice of John Wydif pleading that English law was the law that
should be taught in English universities was a voice that for centuries
cried in the wilderness. ... It was 1758 before Blackstone began Ms
ever famous course at Oxford. The chair that I cannot fill was not estab-
lished until the trans-Atlantic Cambridge was setting an example to her
elderly mother."—Maatland, English Law and the Renaissance> pp. 25, 26.
Maitland was Downing Professor of the Laws of England in the Univer-
sity of Cambridge,