serf is a wrong to the serf." The serf might, as regards men in general, "have lands and goods, property and possession, and all appropriate remedies." But the position was essentially anomalous, for the serf could enforce an agreement made with a person other than his lord; yet if this person endeavoured to enforce a contract against the serf it was a good plea that he was the villein of X. when the agreement was made, and all that he had belonged to him. By degrees this plea seems to have become limited in its force, and while constantly urged in actions for land was not set up in purely 'personal actions. The result of this singular position of the villein was, as is obvious, actually to place him in a better position than a freeman, for even when the villein could be sued, as in regard to chattels, yet, as the latter just as much as the serf belonged to the lord, it was hardly possible "to prevent collusion between villeins and friendly lords." His state of villeinage gave the serf what must also be regarded as other privileges, for he was exempt from onerous and unpleasant duties. "He could not sit as a judge in the communal courts, though he often had to go to them in the humbler capacity of a presenter.' So too he could not be a juror in civil causes: this he probably regarded as a blessed exemption from a duty which fell heavily on freemen." On the other hand in the manorial courts full duties fell on the serf, he could be a presenter, a juror, an affeerer of amercements, and he was commonly the reeve of the township. To discuss here how a man became a serf, and how he could be emancipated, would carry us beyond our present subject; what we must bear in mind is the relativity of serfage in England in the age of Bracton. It is a juristic curiosity,

produced possibly by the desire of lawyers to simplify the state of the law, possibly by other motives which are mere matter of conjecture. The lawyers recked “little of the interests of any classes, high or low; but the interests of the State, of peace and order and royal justice, are ever before them." In the transformation of a more rigorous system of slavery into the relative serfdom of the Middle Ages it is probable that motives of statesmanship had some influence. The change, while producing a social benefit to the class of villeins, created a striking and peculiar feature of English law.

If we turn from the village to the town, from agriculture to commerce, we at once meet with the Jews, the bankers of the mediaval world. At the age of which we are now writing the Jew was a person of the first importance. Though he was in a position of relative servility to the king, that relation gave him, like the serf, some positive advantages. Everything that he acquires, says Bracton, is for the king, and for that very reason it was to the advantage of the sovereign to protect the Jew. Thus a department of the Exchequer was organised for the supervision of the business of loans, which was in the hands mainly of the Jews. It was "a financial bureau and a judicial tribunal." It "acted judicially not merely as between king and Jew, but also as between king and Gentile when, as very often happened, the king had for some cause or other 'seized into his hand' the debts due to one of his Jews by Christian debtors. Also it heard and determined all manner of disputes between Jew and Christian. Such disputes, it is true, generally related to loans of money, but the court seems to have aimed at and

acquired a competence, and an exclusive competence, in all causes, whether civil or criminal, in which a Jew was implicated, unless it was some merely civil cause between two Hebrews, which could be left to a purely Jewish tribunal" (l).

Thus we have here two notable exceptions to the ordinary incidence of the law, which, except in criminal cases, removed the Jew almost entirely from the jurisdiction of English law; though a slave to the king, he was free in relation to all other persons. When Hebrew went to law with Hebrew each appealed to his own tribunal, and when Hebrew and Christian could not agree the dispute was settled by a special tribunal, where the Jew was certain of a favourable audience. In the society of the thirteenth century, immediately before their expulsion from England, the Jews take a foremost place; they are necessary to the king, to the landowner, and to the merchant; they are helping, without the goodwill of the English people, in the development of the English nation, and, what is more to our immediate purpose, they are for the time being producing a marked effect on the course of English law by causing the establishment of special tribunals and the withdrawal of a large and important class of persons from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts. But whether these special tribunals affected the substance of our modern law is doubtful. Be that, however, as it may, no review of English law in the age of Bracton, as it has been termed, is complete which does not take some notice of the relation of the Jew to the laws of the age.

(7) History of English Law, Vol. I. p. 453.

If we turn from laymen to Churchmen we find in clerks and monks a third class of persons, to some extent, not subject to the general law. The exception is the more remarkable because it was from among ecclesiastics that judges and attorneys in legal affairs were mostly drawn. A monk, though civilly dead, and unable to hold any property of his own, was fully capable of acting as the agent of his 'sovereign,' and even in litigation he would. often appear as the abbot's attorney.' The great place which he held in worldly affairs in medieval days is too well known to be here insisted on, but nevertheless in the eye of the law he bore the same relation to the abbot as the villein to his lord; he could neither sue nor be sued without his lord. He was, in fact, in relation to his superior in the same position as the villein to his lord. Every monk was the absolute subject of some 'sovereign' -normally an abbot, but in some cases a prior or a bishop." The sovereign was an absolute monarch, and so long as he did not deprive his subjects of life or limb the temporal power in no way interfered with him. In criminal matters the position of the monk was anomalous. For small offences, transgressiones-or, in modern legal language, “misdemeanours "-he could be punished in the temporal courts. In respect of graver crimes he enjoyed that benefit of clergy which was also the privilege of the clerk. In theory it can scarcely be called a privilege, since under it a clerk could be indicted before two tribunals. For the permission by the secular power to the ecclesiastical power to try clerks who were accused of grave crimes in the ecclesiastical courts cannot be regarded as a relinquishment of the right of trial; it was merely the recognition of a co-ordinate and permitted

jurisdiction. For it has to be remembered that at the time of which we are now speaking a preliminary investigation into the alleged offence was held, and if the jurors. found that the accused was guilty he was delivered to his bishop for trial in the episcopal court. It is said that the procedure in the bishop's court at the end of the thirteenth century was "little better than a farce." Thus the preliminary inquiry, though it may sometimes by the acquittal of a prisoner in the first instance have prevented unjust verdicts in the bishop's court arising out of personal motives, was much more a safeguard against the escape of ecclesiastical offenders who were really guilty of the crimes alleged against them. While in some respects it was an unrecognised protection of the monk and the clerk from episcopal or abbatical tyranny, it was more especially a check on the absolute immunity from punishment of those entitled to the protection of the Church, for the tendency of this privilege of the benefit of the clergy was to "breed crime and impede the course of reasonable and impartial justice." The temporal power, in fact, could and did declare that there was a primâ facie case against an accused clerk: it could not and did not cause him to be punished. It asserted its theoretical right over him as an ordinary citizen, but in most cases its action allowed him to escape altogether from punishment, or only to suffer from the mild judgement of an ecclesiastical court. At the same time the admitted right and the practice of the temporal courts to punish forest offences and "transgressiones" committed by clerks or monks was a tacit surrender by the Church of the whole claim to the exclusion of monks and clerks from the jurisdiction of the sovereign. It put these men on the same