Law Courts 241
complete and unscientific, but alive and growing; not a
ready-made system brought in from outside and imposed
upon the people, but made by the people adminis-
tered by them. The common law has a potent ally
of constitutional government.
5. Relations of the State Courts and the Church Courts.—
In the later middle ages in all the countries of western
Europe, lay jurisdiction was more or less Invaded by
that of the church.1 The discussion of the English
court system cannot be concluded without notice of
the causes and extent of this invasion in England and
its bearing upon the effectiveness of the judiciary. In
the Anglo-Saxon period, there had no such in-
vasion; this was because England was not touched by the
increased church unity and influence resulting from the
Carolingian patronage and the pretensions of the forged
Decretals. Criminous clerks were tried in the popular
courts; litigation between clerks and between clerks and
laymen and the enforcement of many of the laymen's
ecclesiastical obligations found place there also. Only
for holding clerks to their clerical duties, did anything
in the nature of an ecclesiastical court exist, although there
seems to have been an occasional attempt to close civil
differences between clerks by extra-judicial arbitration.
It has been seen how, by the Conquest* England was
brought into the current of continental Influence* and how
this immediately showed itself in the church, checked
1" Starting from the words of the apostle against going to law before
unbelievers, growing at first as a process of voluntary arbitration within
the Church, adding a criminal side with the growth of disciplinary powers
over clergy and members, and greatly stimulated and widened by the
legislation of the early Christian emperors, a body of law and a judicial
organisation had been developed by the Church which rivalled that of the
State in its own field and surpassed it in scientific form and content."—
Adams, The History of England (1066-1216), pp. 278, 279. It will be use-
ful, in this discussion, to keep in mind that the church drew cases to its
courts upon two general grounds: something clerical about the parties
to a suit, or something clerical about the suit itself. Now clerical persons
might do unclerical deeds and unclerical persons could litigate few^causes
in which ingenuity might not discover some trace of the clerical. ^ "With this
double hold, there was opened up before the church a jurisdictioaal vista
practically without end.