number of
the insulated rules which were practised as usages in various
localities. Such general formulas it was, of course, not difficult for
practitioners familiar with the Corpus Juris or the Glosses to supply
in almost any quantity. There was, however, another cause which added
yet more considerably to the lawyers' power. At the period of which we
are speaking, there was universal vagueness of ideas as to the degree
and nature of the authority residing in written texts of law. For the
most part, the peremptory preface, _Ita scriptum est_, seems to have
been sufficient to silence all objections. Where a mind of our own day
would jealously scrutinise the formula which had been quoted, would
inquire its source, and would (if necessary) deny that the body of law
to which it belonged had any authority to supersede local customs, the
elder jurist would not probably have ventured to do more than question
the applicability of the rule, or at best cite some counter
proposition from the Pandects or the Canon Law. It is extremely
necessary to bear in mind the uncertainty of men's notions on this
most important side of juridical controversies, not only because it
helps to explain the weight which the lawyers threw into the
monarchical scale, but on account of the light which it sheds on
several curious historical problems. The motives of the author of the
Forged Decretals and his extraordinary success are rendered more
intelligible by it. And, to take a phenomenon of smaller interest, it
assists us, though only partially, to understand the plagiarisms of
Bracton. That an English writer of the time of Henry III. should have
been able to put off on his countrymen as a compendium of pure English
law a treatise of which the entire form and a third of the contents
were directly borrowed from the Corpus Juris, and that he should have
ventured on this experiment in a country where the systematic study of
the Roman law was formally proscribed, will always be among the most
hopeless enigmas in the history of jurisprudence; but still it is
something to lessen our surprise when we comprehend the state of
opinion at the period as to the obligatory force of written texts,
apart from all consideration of the source whence they were derived.

When the kings of France had brought their long struggle for supremacy
to a successful close, an epoch which may be placed roughly at the
accession of the branch of Valois-Angouleme to the throne, the