8. THE HISTORY OF THE CANON LAW IN ENGLAND ^ By William Stubbs* I IT requires no small amount of moral courage to approach a subject of legal history without being either a lawyer or a philosopher. A lawyer, no doubt, would make short work of it, and pronounce a definitive judgment, without mis- giving, on any subject, historical or other, human or divine, on which he had evidence before him ; and a philosopher would systematise to his own satisfaction any accumulation of details that could possibly be referred to the categories of cause and effect. The student of history has not, ex officio, any such privilege of infallibility ; the highest point to which he can rise is the entire conviction of his own ignorance and incapacity before the vast material of his investigation ; the highest approach to infallibility is the willingness to learn and correct his own mistakes. If he wishes to learn something of a subject, his best policy is to write a book upon it, or to deliver two public statutory ^ This essay is taken from " Lectures on the Study of Mediaeval and Modern History," 1887, pp. 335-381 (Oxford, Clarendon Press). These two lectures were delivered on April 19 and 20, 1882. M825-1901. A. B., Christ Church College, Oxford; Fellow of Trinity College, 1847; Regius Professor of History at Oxford, 1866; Curator of the Bodleian Library, 1869; Canon of St. Paul's, 1879; Bishop of Chester, 1884; Bishop of Oxford, 1889. Other Publications: Select Charters of English Constitutional His- tory, 1870; Constitutional History of England, 1874-1878; Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland (with Mr. Haddan), 1869-1878; Documents Illustrative of English History, 1874; Historical Introductions to the Rolls Series, 1902. With the essay here printed should be compared Professor Mait- land's volume on "Canon Law in England" (1898), and Mr. Holds- worth's chapter on the Ecclesiastical Courts, in his " History of English Law," reprinted in Volume II of the present Essays. 248
