ges scriptae_, or statute law. This is expressly
declared in those remarkable words of the statute 25 Hen. VIII. c. 21.
addressed to the king's royal majesty.--"This your grace's realm,
recognizing no superior under God but only your grace, hath been and
is free from subjection to any man's laws, but only to such as have
been devised, made, and ordained _within_ this realm for the wealth of
the same; or to such other, as by sufferance of your grace and your
progenitors, the people of this your realm, have taken at their free
liberty, by their own consent, to be used among them; and have bound
themselves by long use and custom to the observance of the same: not
as to the observance of the laws of any foreign prince, potentate, or
prelate; but as to the _customed_ and antient laws of this realm,
originally established as laws of the same, by the said sufferance,
consents, and custom; and none otherwise."

[Footnote s: Hist. C.L. c. 2.]

BY the civil law, absolutely taken, is generally understood the civil
or municipal law of the Roman empire, as comprized in the institutes,
the code, and the digest of the emperor Justinian, and the novel
constitutions of himself and some of his successors. Of which, as
there will frequently be occasion to cite them, by way of illustrating
our own laws, it may not be amiss to give a short and general account.

THE Roman law (founded first upon the regal constitutions of their
antient kings, next upon the twelve tables of the _decemviri_, then
upon the laws or statutes enacted by the senate or people, the edicts
of the praetor, and the _responsa prudentum_ or opinions of learned
lawyers, and lastly upon the imperial decrees, or constitutions of
successive emperors) had grown to so great a bulk, or as Livy
expresses it[t], "_tam immensus aliarum super alias acervatarum legum
cumulus_," that they were computed to be many camels' load by an
author who preceded Justinian[u]. This was in part remedied by the
collections of three private lawyers, Gregorius, Hermogenes, and
Papirius; and then by the emperor Theodosius the younger, by whose
orders a code was compiled, _A.D._ 438, being a methodical collection
of all the imperial constitutions then in force: which Theodosian code
was the only book of civil law received as authentic in the western
part of Europe till many centuries after; and to this it is probable
that the Franks and Goths might frequently pay some regard, in framing
legal consti