[20] _Political Science Quarterly_, vol. xxii., No. 2, p. 287.
[21] _Cambridge University Reporter_, July 22, 1907, p. 1313.
[22] _Cambridge University Reporter_, June 22, 1907, p. 1303.
Among the operations which belong to that wonderful period of activity which culminated in the _History of English Law_, two remain to be singled out, the first an enquiry of great delicacy and of crucial importance for the history of legal procedure, the second lying somewhat outside the ordinary sphere of Maitland's investigations but of great moment to the student of parliamentary institutions. We allude to the articles upon the "Register of Original Writs" contributed to the _Harvard Law Review_ in 1889 and to the _Memoranda de Parliamento_ edited for the Rolls Series in 1893.
The Register of the wryttes orygynall and judiciall was first printed by William Rastell in 1531. "In its final form when it gets into print it is an organic book.... To ask for its date would be like asking for the date of one of our great cathedrals. In age after age bishop after bishop has left his mark upon the church; in age after age chancellor after chancellor has left his mark upon the Register.... To ask for the date of the Register is like asking for the date of English law." Yet this vast and important repertory had never been made the subject of critical examination. No one had examined the principles upon which the printed book was constructed; no one had gone behind the printed book to the manuscripts; no one had traced the life history of the organism, had fixed the chronological sequence of the successive styles in the cathedral. Yet until such critical work had been accomplished the history of the extension of royal justice and of the growth of English legal procedure could not be written in detail. Maitland's treatment of the problem is one of the most beautiful specimens of his workmanship.
He first discovers the principles of classification in the printed book; then turning to the manuscripts--and there are at least nineteen in the Cambridge University Library, over all of which he has cast his eye,--reports that no two manuscripts are alike, but that "gradually by comparing many manuscripts we may be able to form some notion of the order in which and the times at which the various writs became recognised members of the _Corpus Brevium_." Tests are then laid down by which the age of a Register may be determined, and finally we have "a few remarks about the early history of the Register" which are entirely original and of high importance. The two earliest manuscripts are examined, the MS Register of 1227 in the British Museum with its fifty-six writs, the MS Cambridge Register belonging likewise to the early part of Henry III's reign with its fifty-eight writs; and means are thus supplied for measuring the growth of law during the important period--the period of the Great Charter--which had elapsed between Glanvill's treatise and the third decade of the thirteenth century. Then we are guided through the later and more voluminous manuscripts. We are introduced to a Register with one hundred and twenty-one writs from the middle of the thirteenth century, to an Edwardian Register which contains four hundred and seventy-one writs; we see the writ of trespass taking a permanent place in the _Corpus Brevium_ under Edward II, we trace activity under Edward III and Richard II and then a slackening. By the turn of the fourteenth century the "great cathedral" is practically complete and the Register has assumed a form not substantially different from that which was printed in the reign of Henry VIII.