Law Courts 235
respect for precedent which marked the time of their
birth, and they aided greatly in its preservation. Since
no more law was to be made, the matter of chief interest
was to know how successive judges had used already exist-
ing principles and procedure. During the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, precedent was built upon prece-
dent and the mass of recorded rules was reasoned upon
and refined to the last extreme of logic in the academic
atmosphere of the Inns of Court, until the common law
had become a wonder and a terror to every one outside the
legal fraternity. Since Edward L, the law of England
has undergone no such fundamental change as it experi-
enced in his time. The modem lawyer may trace back
his legal traditions through more than six centuries, but
the attempt to follow them into the wonderful* creative
century before Edward L, in many cases, proves fruitless.x
It has been shown how the law of England was made a
common law to all freemen and all localities; how it was
shaped by the people, their legal garment made bit by
bit and fitting into the national character; how it was
"toughened" by teaching and the unbroken yearly record
of its application. In the middle of the sixteenth century,
when England was passing into the full tide of Renais-
sance influence and worship of the Roman law was at its
height in Europe and receptions2 were the order of the day,
the vitality of English law was put to a severe test. From
the middle of Henry VIIL's reign to the early part of
Elizabeth's, there were many evidences of its decline.
Other European countries received the Roman law be-
cause their old law was not a common law, was not a vital,
growing law with a hold upon the people, in short, be-
cause it was an impossible law for states advancing rapidly
in unity and civilisation. As far as can be judged, Eng-
land narrowly escaped a reception, for all the surface
forces—and many of them were powerful—were working
1 But the number o£ such cases has been greatly lessened by the work
of Pollock and Maltland which deals mainly with that century.
9 lie technical term for the adoption of the Roman law by a nation.