228 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. and the canonical discipline of souls.^ He did not forbid bishops or other ecclesiastics to take part in secular justice, and they con- tinued to do so long afterwards.^ Perhaps we may doubt whether the apparent and immediate gain of the Church in setting up a judicial system of her own over laymen as well as clerks, which ultimately came into competition and collision with the King's courts, was not in the long run more than outweighed by its drawbacks for both priests and people. But there could be no suspicion of this at the time. In other respects William showed himself even anxious to confirm existing rights and customs. His ordinances, so far as known to us in substance,^ are chiefly directed to that end; he must have allegiance and obedience, and his Norman followers must be protected from the revenge of lurking rebels; they are to be in the King's own peace. But they are to respect EngHsh laws and procedure too; the Norman trial by battle is open to an Englishman to choose if he likes, but he must in no case have it forced on him. The old rules about buying cattle before good witnesses are reasserted and strengthened ; selling men into slavery abroad is again emphatically and this time, we hope, more efficiently forbidden.* A short-lived attempt was made to abolish capital punishment by a sort of rude compromise with humanity, substituting mutilations which now seem to us more repulsive than death. Ranjit Singh's penal justice was of the same kind when he ruled the Panjab in the first half of the nineteenth century.* This, like many other passing experiments in the repression of crime, has no bearing on the general history or development of the law. But it was not a wholly strange thing in England, for a similar tendency appears in Cnut's laws. There was nothing really new, again, in William's flat refusal to do fealty to the Pope, which he expressly put on the ground that he neither had promised it nor could hear of any of his prede- cessors having done it.^ Such a demand had not been refused
- See the text of his ordinance separating the spiritual and temporal courts,
Stubbs, Sel. Ch. 85. 2 In France, on the other hand, there were some curious survivals of popular pro- cedure even in ecclesiastical causes down to the end of the twelfth century. Viol let, Hist, des Institutions politiques et administratives de la France, ii. 455. 8 Stubbs, Sel. Ch. 83. ■* Slave trading died hard. It was not extinct in 1102, for the Synod of Westmin- ster had to condemn it then. See Freeman, N. C. V. 223. 6 Stepnen, Hist. Cr. L. i. 252. * Stubbs, Const. Hist i. 285.
