Athelstane in Excester, Crecklade,
Feversham, and Thundersley, Canutus at Winchester, etc.: other in other
places, whereof this may suffice.[98]

* * * * *

Hitherto also (as I think) sufficiently of such laws as were in use before
the Conquest. Now it resteth that I should declare the order of those that
have been made and received since the coming of the Normans, referred to
the eighth alteration or change of our manner of governance, and thereunto
do produce threescore and four several courts. But for as much as I am no
lawyer, and therefore have but little skill to proceed in the same
accordingly, it shall suffice to set down some general discourses of such
as are used in our days, and so much as I have gathered by report and
common hearsay.

We have therefore in England sundry laws, and first of all the civil, used
in the chancery, admiralty, and divers other courts, in some of which the
severe rigour of justice is often so mitigated by conscience that divers
things are thereby made easy and tolerable which otherwise would appear to
be mere injury and extremity.

We have also a great part of the Canon law daily practised among us,
especially in cases of tithes, contracts of matrimony, and such like, as
are usually to be seen in the consistories of our bishops and higher
courts of the two archbishops, where the exercise of the same is very
hotly followed.

The third sort of laws that we have are our own, and those always so
variable and subject to alteration and change that oft in one age divers
judgments do pass upon one manner of case, whereby the saying of the
poet--

"_Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis_,"

may very well be applied unto such as, being urged with these words, "_In
such a year of the prince this opinion was taken for sound law_," do
answer nothing else but that "_the judgment of our lawyers is now altered,
so that they say far otherwise_."

The regiment that we have therefore after our own ordinances dependeth
upon three laws, to wit, Statute Law, Common Law, Customary Law and
Prescription, according to the triple manner of our trials and judgments,
which is by Parliament, verdict of twelve men at an assize, or wager of
battle, of which the last is little used in our days, as no appeal doth
hold in the first and last rehearsed. But to return to my purpose.

The first is delivered unto us by Parliament, which court (being for the
most part holde