[forms of writs, by which actions are commenced, were perfected in his reign, and established as models for posterity. The pleadings, consequent upon the writs, were then short, nervous, and perspicuous; not intricate, verbose, and formal. The legal treatises, written in his time, as Britton, Fleta, Hengham (9), and the rest, are, for the most part, law at this day; or at least were so, till the alteration of tenures took place. And, to conclude, it is from this period, from the exact observation of Magna Charta, rather than from its making or renewal, in the days of his grandfather and father, that the liberty of Englishmen began again to rear its head; though the weight of the military tenures hung heavy upon it for many ages after.

A better proof cannot be given of the excellence of his constitutions, than that from his time to that of Henry the eighth there happened very few, and those not very considerable, alterations in the legal forms of proceedings. As to matter of substance: the old Gothic powers of electing the principal subordinate magistrates, the sheriffs, and conservators of the peace, were taken from the people in the reigns of Edward the second and Edward the third; and justices of the peace were established instead of the latter. In the reign also of Edward the third the parliament is supposed most probably to have assumed its present form; by a separation of the Commons from the Lords. The statute for defining and ascertaining treasons was one of the first productions of this new-modelled assembly; and the translation of the law proceedings, from French into Latin, another. Much also was done, under the auspices of this magnanimous prince, for establishing our domestic manufactures; by prohibiting the exportation of English wool, and the importation or wear of foreign cloth or furs; and by encouraging clothworkers from other countries to settle here. Nor was the legislature inattentive to many other branches of commerce, or indeed to commerce in (q) As to these, see Reeves's Hist. Eng. L. vol. ii. p. 280, &c.

[general; for, in particular, it enlarged the credit of the merchant, by introducing the statute staple; whereby he might the more readily pledge his lands for the security of his mercantile debts. And, as personal property now grew, by the extension of trade, to be much more considerable than formerly, care was taken, in case of intestacies, to appoint administrators particularly nominated by the law; to distribute that personal property among the creditors and kindred of the deceased, which before had been usually applied, by the officers of the ordinary, to uses then denominated pious. The statutes also of præmunire, for effectually depressing the civil power of the pope, were the work of this and the subsequent reign. And the establishment of a laborious parochial clergy, by the endowment of vicarages out of the overgrown possessions of the monasteries, added lustre to the close of the fourteenth century: though the seeds of the general reformation, which were thereby first sown in the kingdom, were almost overwhelmed by the spirit of persecution, introduced into the laws of the land by the influence of the regular clergy.

armu."

From this time to that of Henry the seventh, the civil wars and disputed titles to the crown gave no leisure for further juridical improvement: "nam silent leges inter And yet it is to these very disputes that we owe the happy loss of all the dominions of the Crown on the continent of France; which turned the minds of our subsequent princes entirely to domestic concerns. To these likewise we owe the method of barring entails by the fiction of common recoveries, invented originally by the clergy, to evade the statutes of mortmain, but introduced under Edward the fourth, for the purpose of unfettering estates, and making them more liable to forfeiture: while, on the other hand, the owners endeavoured to protect them by the universal establishment of uses, another of the clerical inventions.

In the reign of King Henry the seventh, his ministers,

[not to say the king himself, were more industrious in hunting out prosecutions upon old and forgotten penal laws, in order to extort money from the subject, than in framing any new beneficial regulations. For the distinguishing character of this reign was, that of amassing treasure in the king's coffers, by every means that could be devised: and almost every alteration in the laws, however salutary or otherwise in their future consequences, had this, and this only, for their great and immediate object. To this end the Court of Star Chamber was new modelled, and armed with powers, the most dangerous and unconstitutional, over the persons and properties of the subject. Informations were allowed to be received, in lieu of indictments at the assizes and sessions of the peace, in order to multiply fines and pecuniary penalties. The statute of fines for landed property was craftily and covertly contrived, to facilitate the destruction of entails, and make the owners of real estates more capable to forfeit as well as to alien. The benefit of clergy, which so often intervened to stop attainders and save the inheritance, was now allowed only once to lay offenders, who only could have inheritances to lose. A writ of capias was permitted in all actions on the case, and the defendant might in consequence be outlawed; because upon such outlawry his goods became the property of the Crown. In short, there is hardly a statute in this reign, introductive of a new law or modifying the old, but what either directly or obliquely tended to the emolument of the exchequer.

IV. This brings us to the fourth period of our legal history, viz. the reformation of religion, under Henry the eighth, and his children; which opens an entirely new scene in ecclesiastical matters; the usurped power of the pope being now for ever routed and destroyed, all his connexions with this island cut off, the Crown restored to its supremacy over spiritual men and causes, and the patronage of bishoprics being once more indisputably vested in

[the king. And, had the spiritual courts been at this time reunited to the civil, we should have seen the old Saxon constitution, with regard to ecclesiastical polity, completely restored.

With regard also to our civil polity, the statute of wills and the statute of uses, both passed in the reign of this prince, made a great alteration as to property: the former by allowing the devise of real estates by will, which before was in general forbidden; the latter, by endeavouring to destroy the intricate nicety of uses, though the narrowness and pedantry of the courts of common law prevented this statute from having its full beneficial effect. And thence the courts of equity assumed a jurisdiction, dictated by common justice and common sense; which, however arbitrarily exercised or productive of jealousies in its infancy, has at length been matured into a system of rational jurisprudence; the principles of which, notwithstanding they may differ in forms, are now equally adopted by the courts of both law and equity. From the statute of uses, and another statute of the same antiquity, which protected estates for years from being destroyed by the reversioner, a remarkable alteration took place in the mode of conveyancing: the antient assurance by feoffment and livery upon the land being thenceforth very seldom practised, since the more easy and more private invention of transferring property by secret conveyances to uses,-and long terms of years being now continually created in mortgages and family settlements, which might be moulded to a thousand useful purposes by the ingenuity of an able artist.

The further attacks in this reign upon the immunity of estates tail, which reduced them to little more than the conditional fees at the common law before the passing of the statute De donis; the establishment of recognizances in the nature of a statute staple, for facilitating the raising of money upon landed security, and the introduction of the bankrupt laws, as well for the punishment of the fraudu

[lent, as the relief of the unfortunate, trader; all these were capital alterations of our legal polity, and highly convenient to that character, which the English began now to reassume, of a great commercial people. The incorporation of Wales with England, and the more uniform administration of justice, by destroying some counties palatine, and abridging the unreasonable privileges of such as remained, added dignity and strength to the monarchy; and, together with the numerous improvements before observed upon, and the redress of many grievances and oppressions which had been introduced by his father, will ever make the administration of Henry the eighth a very distinguished era in the annals of juridical history.

It must be however remarked, that particularly in his later years, the royal prerogative was strained to a very tyrannical and oppressive height; and, what was the worst circumstance, its encroachments were established by law, under the sanction of those pusillanimous parliaments, one of which, to its eternal disgrace, passed a statute, whereby it was enacted that the king's proclamations should have the force of acts of parliament; and others concurred in the creation of that amazing heap of wild and newfangled treasons, which were slightly touched upon in a former place. Happily for the nation this arbitrary reign was succeeded by the minority of an amiable prince, during the short sunshine of which great part of these extravagant laws were repealed. And to do justice to the shorter reign of Queen Mary, many salutary and popular laws, in civil matters, were made under her administration, perhaps the better to reconcile the people to the bloody measures which she was induced to pursue, for the re-establishment of religious slavery: the well-concerted schemes for effecting which were, through the providence of God, defeated by the seasonable accession of Queen Elizabeth.

The religious liberties of the nation being, by that happy event, established (we trust) on an eternal basis, though obliged in their infancy to be guided, against papists and

VOL. IV.

Q Q