6. M AIT LAND: THE RENAISSANCE 197 us notice one difference which, if I am not mistaken, marked off England from the rest of the world. Medieval England / had schools of national law. The importance of certain law schools will be readily con- ceded, even to one who is in some sort officially bound to believe that law schools may be important. A history of civilization would be miserably imperfect if it took no account of the first new birth of Roman law in the Bologna of Irnerius. Indeed there are who think that no later movement, — not the Renaissance, not the Reformation — draws a stronger line across the annals of mankind than that which is drawn about the year 1100 when a human science won a place beside theol- ogy. I suppose that the importance of the school of Bourges would also be conceded. It may be worth our while to remark that the school of Bologna had a precursor in the school of Pavia, and that the law which was the main subject of study in the Pavia of the eleventh century was not Roman law but Lombard law: a body of barbaric statutes that stood on one level with the Anglo-Saxon laws of the same age. This I say, not in order that I may remind you what sort of law it was these three books are published by the Selden Society.) On the other hand, no proof has been given that in the middle age the chancery introduced any substantive law of Roman origin. At a later time when it began to steal work (suits for legacies and the like) from the ecclesiastical courts, it naturally borrowed the rules by which those matters had theretofore been governed. • A full history of the Reception in Scotland seems to be a desideratum. But see Goudy, Fate of Roman Law (Inaugural Lecture), 1894; also J. M. Irvine, Roman Law in Oreen's Encyclopcedia of the Law of Scot- land. Whether at any time the Reception in Scotland ran the length that it ran in Germany may be doubted; but the influence exercised by English example since 1603 would deserve the historian's consideration. Even if this influence went no further than the establishment of the habit of finding " authority " in decided cases, it would be of great importance. Where such a habit is established in practice and sanctioned by theory, any return to the pure text, such as that which was preached in Germany by "the historical school," would be impossible. Also it may be suggested that the Roman law which played upon the law of Scotland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not always very Roman, but was strongly dashed with " Natural Law." For in- stance, if in Scotland the firm of partners is a "legal person," this is not due to the influence of Roman law as it is now understood by famous expositors, or as it was understood in the middle ages. Also (to take another example) it seems impossible to get the Scotch " trust " out of Roman law by any fair process. The suggestion that it is " a contract made up of the two nominate contracts of deposit and man- date" seems a desperate effort to romanize what is not Roman.
