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much affect the inferior courts, where the law was administered as it had been under the Saxons; but trial by jury was greatly improved. The men composing it were chosen from the neighbourhood where any crime was committed. They might be challenged. They could not give evidence as in Saxon times. The office of jurors arose with the custom of taxation. To make a proper entry of all persons and properties in Doomesday Book, William found it necessary to change the jurors. Every few years added to this necessity. Thus the people were taxed by the good' men of the district. William governed England by means of his council, which consisted of barons only. The king's court judged all causes, but by degrees became divided into the four courts which sit at Westminster still. Itinerant judges began to be known in the reign of Henry the Second; but it is notorious that in his reign there was no court in which justice was not bought or sold, as a common article of merchandise.' Money paved the way for all desires. But good came from these excesses. Normans and English were thus prepared, from the feeling of their common wrongs, to act together for their common deliverance. The provisions of Magna Charta point to nearly all the customs and abuses above mentioned as among the grievances of the times.' That great deed was gained in 1215. John was then king. His fame is chiefly dependent upon his quarrels with the King of France, the Pope, and his own barons. The latter wrested the charter of their liberties from him at Runnymede. It was a solemn protest against the evil of arbitrary arrests, and arbitrary taxation.' It placed the law as a fence about the person of the subject; and in regard to taxation, it placed the authority of the common council of the kingdom' abreast with the authority of the king. Even the villein' had certain rights secured by this arrangement of the nobles. It was expressly stipulated that there should be 'no sale, no delay, no denial of justice,' in the case of the humblest freeman.

In the Church, William substituted Normans for Saxons in all high offices; he also instituted the spiritual courts which have been long known in this country. This introduced the canon law, and an endless train of vexations, from all of which we are not yet recovered. Celibacy was also enforced upon the clergy, and the dogma of transubstantiation added to the creed. The Anglo-Saxons had favoured neither of these; but when they were adopted in England, the power of the priesthood threatened the authority of kings. This was the age when Odo and Dunstan, Anselm and Becket, successively held the see of Canterbury, and when great disputes arose respecting the investitures of bishops. Papal wisdom condemned the charter, and the men who exacted it. The ambition of the priest sought to subdue the crown and noble,

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noble, and villein alike. These were the dark ages. The state of religion could not be healthy amidst venality, strife, and false doctrine. The Norman clergy knew not the language of the people, and cared not for their welfare. Themselves reckless, and often immoral, they could not keep the people from sinking into spiritual death. Religious life had few who illustrated its beauty or realized its happiness, and the Gospel was estranged from the people by the clergy. In the towns, as intelligence advanced and schools arose, dissatisfaction with the Church was felt, and some earnest inquirers found the truth that saves. In the reign of

Henry the Second, we read of a few who refused to invoke the saints, to believe in purgatory, or to pray for the dead; and who were publicly whipped through the streets of Oxford, three times, almost naked, in the depth of winter, into the open country, where, unassisted by all, and under the ban of excommunication, they perished by cold and famine. So began,' says Dr. Vaughan, the punishment of death on account of religious opinions in our history. This was in 1159.'

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Social life had to pass through a painful ordeal at the time of the Conquest, ere it could settle into order, or realize benefit, if any could be got, from the revolution. Industry was impeded by warfare. Traffic was dangerous. Farming was oppressed by exactions. But this could not continue. The Normans found it to be their interest to encourage agriculture and handicraft. Wool had been long exported and cloth imported; but manufacture slowly returned. The mines of Devon and Cornwall were wrought. Slavery, which had been disgracing and degrading the Englishman, was condemned. Seaports arose. But foreigners forestalled the market, and Jews congregated in towns and threatened to monopolize the trade. A harsh oppression of the latter followed, and laws for protecting the native trader were passed. Ship-building and seamanship then began to prosper, and commerce to extend.

Learning was favoured by Norman kings. Schools, lay as well as clerical, were multiplied. The Universities gained more renown. Upwards of a thousand students were resident at Oxford in the thirteenth century, and many students came from Paris to our ancient seat of learning. Cambridge in the same century had its noted teachers, and numbers of students. Aristotle was then the master of all philosophy, and the schoolmen flourished. Nominalism and Realism had their disputants among the English, and keen discussions on these subtle points drew forth intellectual life. The Latin language was spoken in all the schools of England, and contributed to give our scholars acquaintance with the letters and literary movements of Europe. The 'jongleurs' circulated thought among the people in a light form, light form, and exer

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cised an awakening influence on the slumbering imagination and feeling of multitudes.' Authors, too, came forth. Geoffry of Monmouth published his British History' in 1147, and his book, though full of fictions, became familiar to the most of the reading public of his day. It was first written in Latin, but was speedily translated into Norman, English, and Welsh. Copies were multiplied in great numbers, and the work was embellished anew, in whole or in part, by many writers, in prose and in verse. It thus became the basis of a popular historical literature-in the hands of Shakspeare of a dramatic literature, the fame of which must live as long as the name of the great bard himself shall live.' Various other authors flourished in this period, among whom we may mention Wace, the author of The Romance of Rollo.'

The language of the learned at the period of the Conquest was Latin, that of the court and of the tribunal was French; but the English tongue was the vernacular of the people, and soon gained upon the literary, the courtly, and the legal. The Saxon element was to engulph all others, and from the amalgam to make the Englishman with a language, a literature, a law, a liberty, an enterprise, and a religion eminently his own.

By the Conquest,' says Dr. Vaughan, ‘our island almost ceased to be insular. England became a consolidated power, participating in all the questions and interests affecting the nations of Europe. In the great controversy, for example, between the ecclesiastical and the civil power, England has its full share. All the subtle pleas on which such controversies were founded became familiar to men's thoughts in this country. Ecclesiastical disputes, military affairs in Normandy, the commencement of the Crusades, the fame of our Richard I. in these enterprises, the new laws, and the new features in the administration of law, all may be said to have been both the effects and the causes of a new wakefulness, disposing men to observe, to reflect, and judge in regard to what was passing about them. The five hundred monasteries had their schools, but the five hundred towns and cities were all schools; and in these last, the lessons taught, though little marked or perceived, were ceaseless, manifold, and potent. By degrees, Norman and Saxon became more equal. Marriages between the two races became every-day events. In the face of the law and of the magistrate, the two races may be said by this time to have been two races no longer. If the Saxon burgess and the Norman alderman still looked at times with jealousy upon each other, the fight between them became comparatively fair and harmless, as it became less a battle of the strong against the weak. When the corpse of King John was laid in Worcester Cathedral, the dark day in the history of England had passed. In future, the Norman, whether prince or baron, must demean himself more honourably towards the Englishman, or cease to be powerful. The revolution of this period to the Saxon, had consisted in his being defeated, despoiled, down-trodden, and in his recovering himself from that position by his own patient energy, so as to regain from the new race of kings all the liberty he had lost, and guarantees for that liberty which were full of the seeds of a greater liberty to come. With this revolution to the Saxon, there came revolution to the Norman. The Norman is no longer a man of military science, and nothing more-no longer a mere patron of letters, with scarcely a tincture of them himself. His intelligence is enlarged; his tastes are expanded and refined. The country of his adoption is becoming more an object of affection to him than the country from which he has derived his name. In short, the Norman is about to disappear in the Englishman. The Englishman is not about to disappear in the Norman. After all, the oldest dwellers upon the soil have proved to be the strongest.'

ART.

What'll You Drink?

WHAT'LL YOU DRINK?*

* An American reprint indicative of the new phase of agitation by the license party, the outcry against adulteration of liquor. But drinking pure liquors cannot cure drunkenness.