236 The Period of Constitution Making
Łor it. But she escaped for the simple reason that she
had a law that measurably sufficed her, a law with such
deep and tough roots in the national life that to tear it
away would have been a sort of national suicide. When
England passed from the medieval into the modern, she
did not, like some of her sister countries, leave the medie-
val law behind.x
The political importance of this preservation of the old
law can hardly be overstated.
The English common law was tough, one of the toughest
things ever made. And well for England was it in the days
of Tudors and Stuarts that this was so. A simpler, a more
rational, a more elegant system would have been an apt
Instrument of despotic rule. At times the judges were sub-
servient enough: the king could dismiss them from their
offices at a moment's notice; but the clumsy, cumbrous sys-
tem, though it might bend, would never break. It was ever
awkwardly rebounding and confounding the statecraft which
had tried to control it. The strongest king, the ablest min-
ister, the rudest lord-protector could make little of this "un-
godly jumble.*'a
rMaitland's brilliant lecture. The English Law and the Renaissance,
should be read in this connection. It is with a sort of congratulatory
enthusiasm, possible only to one who had entered so deeply into the life
of the crotchety but salutary old system, that he speaks of its safe passage
of the crisis and of its recovering strength. "When the middle of the cen-
tury is past the signs that English law has a new lease of life become many.
The medieval books poured from the press, new books were written, the
decisions of the courts were more diligently reported, the lawyers were
boasting of the independence and extreme antiquity of their system. We
were having a little Renaissance of our own: or a gothic revival if you
please. . . . That wonderful Edward Coke was loose. The medieval
tradition was more than safe in his hands."—P. 29. "Sir Edward Coke,
the incarnate common law," he calls him in another place, who "shovels
out Ms enormous learning in vast disorderly heaps. Carlyle's felicity has
for ever stamped upon Coke the adjective 'tough'—'tough old Coke
upon Littleton, one of the toughest men ever made.' We may well trans-
fer the word from the man to the law that was personified in him."—
Sketch of English Legal History, p. 113.
*IUd:i pp. 113, 114. Roman law had these same traits "during the
ages of its^growth, and it is well to remember that, as Roman law took on
a more scientific form, and was reduced to an organised system, its life
and power of growth ceased. History does not show any necessary con-
nection between these two events; but certainly, if the formation of a
scientific system on the basis of the English common law is to mean that
our kw and institution-making power is past, then every Anglo-Saxon may