346

The Green Bag

to the lives of judges can also be done with regard to the lives of the great authors in the law.

At the end of nine

hundred years but six names stand out like towering peaks— but six names in English law stand there as beacon lights and guides to succeeding genera tions: Glanville, Bracton, Littleton, Coke, Hale and Blackstone. Take Glan ville, the Chief justice of Henry the Second, the greatest English king upon the throne for a period of at least three

hundred years: Glanville, the author of the first systematic treatise upon the law of England. The sort of fellow he was, the material of his biography, you will find in the preface of the eighth volume of Coke's reports.

Then you

can trace it out from there to earlier works. A man starting originally as sheriff in the County of York, on the northern border, when the king was on crusade, acting really as Vice-Regent of the realm, of such military capacity that he organized a military force and

surprised the Scottish King, William the Lion, and made prisoner of him; a man

who afterwards became so fired with holy zeal that, at the age of seventy, he

went on the crusade and died at the foot of the walls of Acre, in the presence of

Richard Cceur de Lion-and yet the author of the first systematic treatise of the English law. You open the book and look at it.

You say it is not

a philosophical discourse.

It is a book

of practice, but, strange to say, the very language of the writs by which suitors

were summoned to appear before the King wherever the King happened to be in the kingdom, was couched precisely in the same terms that we have today in our ordinary writs of summons—

and even of execution. We find much space devoted to the doctrine of essoigns, we find that the excuses for non-appear ance were that the defendant was be

yond the seas, or that he was in the crusade, or with the army, or that a freshet had broken down a bridge and

that he could not reach Winchester in time, or that he lay sick on the road, and then to guard against malingering a special commission was issued to investigate into the truth of the excuse.

We associate this first great treatise with the period of the crusade fifty years before the passage of Magna Carta. It is not difficult to remember that the

six great names I have mentioned are more or less closely associated with events of importance to American his tory, Glanville writing about fifty years

before the great statute of Magna Carta. Bracton writing about fifty years after

the statute of Magna Carta. the prin ciples of which lie at the basis of our constitutions, both federal and state. Bracton for five hundred years domi

nated the profession, one of the justices itinerary of Henry Ill, traveling over

the kingdom of England in order to take the part of the King, who had at that time delegated the personal duty of sitting in his Court to his Chief Justice. The work of Bracton is the most beautiful treatise, scientifically and

in point of expression, that existed in the law prior to the time of Blackstone Neither Coke nor Hale can compete with it in style. There is a reference in Brac

ton to what a good judge should be, to what exalted justice should be, that

deserves to be quoted on the notes in full. I won't attempt to give it from memory. I will write it because it will give you an idea not only of the lofti ness of the man's mind, the extent of his grasp upon the breadth and sublimity

of jurisprudence, but also his exalted notions of the function of the judge.I aLet not one, who is unwise and unlearned. ascend the judgment seat, which is, as it were. the throne of God, lest he convert darkness into ligh! and light into darkness, and lest with a sword in