Odger's English Common Law

52 THE SOURCES OF THE LAW OF ENGLAND.
the Danes settled in our eastern counties. A large portion of
these diverse customs— probably the larger portion —was
embodied in the Dooms of Aethelbert, King of Kent (circa
a.d. 600), in the Dooms of Ine, King of Wessex (circa a.d.
690), in the Ordinances of King Alfred the Great (circa a.d.
900), and in the English Dooms of Cnut, who died in a.d. 1035.
They thus became laws ; for the King at this time was the
only lawmaker in England. 1 No Celtic element can be found
in these primitive Anglo-Saxon and Danish Codes ;
nor any
trace of Eoman law, except in the few portions which deal
with ecclesiastical affairs.
After the Norman Conquest the Saxon system of land
tenure was crushed beneath an alien feudalism ;
the methods
of trial and the punishments were altered in the case of the
but in most other respects our Norman
more serious crimes ;
Kings permitted their Saxon subjects to retain their Saxon
laws and customs. In the reign of Henry L, and even in
that of his grandson Henry II., there still flourished in
England four different kinds of law. The Wessex law, the
Mercian law, and the Dane law still survived in their own
shires and shaded off into each other; but, apart from and
above these local systems, stood paramount the law and
practice of the King's own Court, the Aula vel Curia Regis.
Glanville, 2 the first of the long series of our great text-book
Tvriters, wrote in the last year of King Henry II. a tractate
concerning the " Laws and Customs of the Kingdom of
England," in which he tells us nothing of the law administered
in the local Courts, but confines himself to the justice
administered in the King's Court and by the King's justices
when on circuit. And before the reign of Edward I., though
local customs still lingered here and there, the four systems
were welded into one " Common Law," which was in force
all over England.
Already, too, English law had shown a tendency to become
case law. We still have trans'cripts from the parchment rolls
1 See an excellent article in the Encyclopedia Britannica (volume 28) by the
late Professor Maitland, called the History of English Law.
2 Ralph de Glanville, born before 1135 ; Chief Justiciar 1180 ; killed at the siege,
of Acre, 1190 ; see Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chief Justices, Vol. I. at p. 25.