Note 37 — ENGLISH LAW AND THE RENAISSANCE.

From the time of Bracton to the present day Englishmen have often allowed themselves phrases which exaggerate the practical prevalence of Roman law on the continent of Europe. Smith, for instance, who had been in many parts of northern France and was a learned and observant man, must have known that (to use Voltaire’s phrase) he often changed law when he changed horses and that the Estates General had lately been demanding a unification of the divergent customs (Viollet, Histoire du droit civil français, p. 202; Planiol, Droit civil, 1900, vol. I., p. 16). Germans, who know what an attempt to administer Roman law really means, habitually speak of French law as distinctively un-Roman. Thus Rudolph Sohm (Fränkisches Recht und römisches Recht, Weimar, 1880, p. 76): ‘die Gesetzbücher Napoleons I. zeigen, dass noch heute wenigstens das Privatrecht und Processrecht Frankreichs ein Abkömmling nicht des römischen, noch des italienischen, sondern des fränkischen Rechtes ist.’ So Planiol (op. cit., vol. I., p. 26): ‘Deux courants se sont trouvés en présence lors de l’unification du droit français: l’esprit romain et les traditions coutumières. Ce sont ces dernières qui l’ont emporté. Le Code a été rédigé à Paris, en plein pays coutumier; les conseillers d’État appartenaient en majorité aux provinces septentrionales; le parlement de Paris avait eu dans l’ancien droit un rôle prépondérant. Il n’y a donc rien d’étonnant à voir l’esprit des coutumes prédominer dans le Code; le contraire eût été un non-sens historique.’ Until the other day it was, I believe, a common remark that the large part of Germany which stood under the French code either in a translated or untranslated form—and this part contained about one-sixth of the Empire’s population—was the part of Germany in which the law was least Roman and most Germanic. The division of France into two great districts was not equal: before the acquisition of Elsass from Germany ‘les pays de droit écrit comprenaient à peine les deux cinquièmes de la France’ (Planiol, op. cit., vol. I., p. 11). See the useful map in Brissaud, Histoire du droit français, p. 152. Even in the south there was much customary law. A famous sentence in the custumal of Bordeaux placed ‘the written law’ below ‘natural reason’ (Viollet, op. cit., p. 150). Still it is not to be denied that a slow process of romanization—very different from the catastrophic Reception in Germany—went on steadily for some five or six centuries; and a system which as a whole seems very un-Roman to a student of what became ‘the common law’ of Germany may rightly seem Roman to an Englishman. Francis Bacon knew that France could not be compendiously described as a country governed by the civil law. In his speech on the Union of Laws (Spedding, Life and Letters, vol. III., p. 337) he accurately distinguishes ‘Gascoigne, Languedock, Provence, Dolphinie’ which are ‘governed by the letter or text of the civil law’ from ‘the Isle of France, Tourayne, Berry, Anjou and the rest, and most of all Brittain and Normandy,’ which are ‘governed by customs which amount unto a municipal law, and use the civil law but only for grounds and to decide new and rare cases.’ English readers should at least know the doctrine, strongly advocated in modern Germany, that the private law which was developed in England by a French-speaking court was just one more French coutume. Sohm, Fränkisches Recht und römisches Recht, p. 69: ‘Die Vorgeschichte des englischen Rechts von heute hat nicht in England, sondern in Nordfrankreich ihre Heimath … Stolz kann die Lex Salica auf die zahlreichen und mächtigen Rechte blicken, welche sie erzeugt hat.’