ly
questionable; but at all events, on the assumption that there was once
a large mass of civil and criminal rules known exclusively to the
judges, it presently ceased to be unwritten law. As soon as the Courts
at Westminster Hall began to base their judgments on cases recorded,
whether in the year books or elsewhere, the law which they
administered became written law. At the present moment a rule of
English law has first to be disentangled from the recorded facts of
adjudged printed precedents, then thrown into a form of words varying
with the taste, precision, and knowledge of the particular judge, and
then applied to the circumstances of the case for adjudication. But at
no stage of this process has it any characteristic which distinguishes
it from written law. It is written case-law, and only different from
code-law because it is written in a different way.

From the period of Customary Law we come to another sharply defined
epoch in the history of jurisprudence. We arrive at the era of Codes,
those ancient codes of which the Twelve Tables of Rome were the most
famous specimen. In Greece, in Italy, on the Hellenised sea-board of
Western Asia, these codes all made their appearance at periods much
the same everywhere, not, I mean, at periods identical in point of
time, but similar in point of the relative progress of each community.
Everywhere, in the countries I have named, laws engraven on tablets
and published to the people take the place of usages deposited with
the recollection of a privileged oligarchy. It must not for a moment
be supposed that the refined considerations now urged in favour of
what is called codification had any part or place in the change I have
described. The ancient codes were doubtless originally suggested by
the discovery and diffusion of the art of writing. It is true that the
aristocracies seem to have abused their monopoly of legal knowledge;
and at all events their exclusive possession of the law was a
formidable impediment to the success of those popular movements which
began to be universal in the western world. But, though democratic
sentiment may have added to their popularity, the codes were certainly
in the main a direct result of the invention of writing. Inscribed
tablets were seen to be a better depositary of law, and a better
security for its accurate preservation, than the memory of a number of
persons however strengthened by habitual exercise.

The Roman code belongs to th