Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

The Structure of English Common Law in the Seventeenth Century 69
Signification of Words', and announced in the preface to that work a further
tract he was preparing on legal rules (de regulis mm). 40 These three works,
in the order Cowell planned to complete them, would have matched the
three-part introductory textbooks that were popular for students of civil
law: Justinian's Institutes followed by the two last titles of the Digest, de
verborum signification and de diversis regulis iuris antiqui. 41 This glimpse of
Cowell's overall plan raises the further question - for whom did he compose
his Institutiones Juris Anglicanit
Though the preface to the Institutiones, like the dedication of The Interpreter,
addressed both civilians and common lawyers, it is now often supposed
that Cowell directed his work primarily to students of civil law at Cambridge
and Oxford, to teach them the laws of their own country. 42 There had been
some very basic instruction on common law in or around the universities since
at least the fifteenth century, and Cambridge officials in 1570 sought to require
that recipients of the D.C.L. study the laws of England. 43 Cowell's work not
only served this need, but gave civilians, already intimately familiar with the
content of Justinian's Institutes, the means to draw ready lessons about the
'universal principles of justice' that underlay English and Roman law. 44
The Institutiones surely provided useful knowledge to students of civil law
in a most palatable form, but Cowell (or his publisher) probably had in mind a
readership among students of the common law as well. The number of civilians
in England was tiny, twelve or fifteen practising in London at any one time. 45
It is impossible to know how many common lawyers bought the 1605 edition
40
Cowell, Interpreter, preface, sig. *3v. Cowell left the final tract unfinished at his death in 1611.
41
Francis Bacon recommended to James VI and I that three such works be prepared to supplement
a digest of English law, 'A Proposition to His Majesty . . . Touching the Compiling and Amendment
of the Laws of England' in Works of Francis Bacon, xiii, 61, 70.
42
C.P. Rodgers, 'LegalHumanismandEnglishLaw-TheContributionof the English Civilians', Irish
Jur., N.S.,xix (1984), 127-28; Stein, 'Continental Influences', 1108; Levack, Civil Lawyers, 137.
43
An Oxford statute of 1432 sought to regularize some (probably extramural) teaching of the
'English mode of pleading', Statuta Antiqua Universitatis Oxoniensis, S. Gibson, ed. (Oxford, 1931),
240-41; H. Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1936), iii,
162; A. Giuliani, 'The Influence of Rhetoric on the Law of Evidence and Pleading', L'Educazione
Giuridica (Perugia, 1979), ii, 228; J. Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae, S.B. Chrimes ed. and
tr. (Cambridge, 1949), 195-96. Dr. Whitgift's reformed set of statutes for Cambridge University,
promulgated in 1570 but successfully resisted by the Puritan faction within the university, had required
that a doctor of laws study the laws of England soon after taking the doctorate, so that he not be ignorant
of the laws of his own country, De legum doctoribus, ch. 14, Cambridge University Transactions during
the Puritan Controversies of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, J. Heywood and T. Wright, ed., i
(1854), 10, ix; Levack, Civil Lawyers, 128. James Whitelocke reported studying the common law from
a civilian's manuscript when he accepted an Oxford fellowship in civil law, M.H. Curtis, Oxford and
Cambridge in Transition, 1558-1642 (Oxford, 1959), 159-60.
44
Stein, 'Continental Influences', 1108; Watson, 'Justinian's Institutes and Some English Counterparts',
183; Levack, Civil Lawyers, 137.
45
Levack, Civil Lawyers, 3, 21-22; Coquillette, 'Legal Ideology and Incorporation', 21, n. 66 and
Civilian Writers, 31 and n. 66. Levack counted about 200 in all the civilian callings between 1603 and
1641 and cited estimates of perhaps 2,000 barristers in the comparable period.