the pathway for a Reception was prepared. Not difficult but perhaps wearisome. At this point it is impossible for us to forget that the year 1485, if important to students of English history for other reasons, is lamentably important for this reason, that there Dr Stubbs laid down his pen. In his power of marshalling legal details so as to bring to view some living principle or some phase of national development he has had no rival and no second among Englishmen. Howbeit, we may think of the subjected church and the humbled baronage, of the parliament which exists to register the royal edicts, of the English Lex Regia which gives the force of statute to the king's proclamations42, of the undeniable faults of the common law, of its dilatory methods, of bribed and perjured juries, of the new courts which grow out of the King's Council and adopt a summary procedure devised by legists and decretists. Might not the Council and the Star Chamber and the Court of Requests—courts not tied and bound by ancient
