intelligent purchasers of law as a notable step
in the right direction. But the reform was by no means acceptable to the
majority of the bar, who did not hesitate to stigmatize the measure as a
dangerous innovation--which would prove injurious to learned lawyers and
peace-loving citizens, although it might possibly serve the purposes of
ignorant counsel and litigious 'lay gents.'[28]The legal literature of
three generations following Charles I.'s execution abounds with
contemptuous allusions to the 'English times' of Cromwell; the
old-fashioned reporters, hugging their Norman-French and looking with
suspicion on popular intelligence, were vehement in expressing their
contempt for the prevalent misuse of the mother tongue. "I have,"
observes Styles, in the preface to his reports, "made these reports
speak English; not that I believe that they will be thereby more
generally useful, for I have always been and yet am of opinion, that
that part of the Common Law which is in the English hath only occasioned
the making of unquiet spirits contentiously knowing, and more apt to
offend others than to defend themselves; but I have done it in obedience
to authority, and to stop the mouths of such of this English age, who,
though they be confessedly different in their minds and judgments, as
the builders of Babel were in their language, yet do think it vain, if
not impious, to speak or understand more than their own mother tongue."
In like manner, Whitelock's uncle Bulstrode, the celebrated reporter,
says of the second part of his reports, "that he had manny years since
perfected the words in French, in which language he had desired it
might have seen the light, being most proper for it, and most convenient
for the professors of the law."

The restorers who raised Charles II. to his father's throne, lost no
time in recalling Latin to the records and writs; and so gladly did the
reporters and the practising counsel avail themselves of the reaction in
favor of discarded usages, that more Law-French was written and talked
in Westminster Hall during the time of the restored king, than had been
penned and spoken throughout the first fifty years of the seventeenth
century.

The vexatious and indescribably absurd use of Law-Latin in records,
writs, and written pleadings, was finally put an end to by statute 4
George II. c. 26; but this bill, which discarded for legal processes a
cumbrous and harsh language, that was alike unmusical and i