Читать книгу A Concise History of the Common Law - Theodore F. T. Plucknett - Страница 161

We have frequently insisted that the common law was essentially the law of land. The implications of this fact were very far-reaching. Its procedure was designed to reach people who owned land, and consequently was directed principally against the land rather than the person. The King’s Court was at first concerned with the king’s tenants and their feudal rights and duties, and such people could be most surely reached through their feudal holdings. When the common law of the King’s Court was becoming the common law of the country, it had to deal with very different problems. Other heads of law besides real property had to be developed, and litigants of the newer type were not always landowners of any consequence, although they may have had other forms of wealth. The old procedure was not always effective in these cases. The common law procedure was generally patient and long-suffering, for it well knew that the tenant’s land at least could not be removed from its jurisdiction. It knew also that haste was practically undesirable, for agriculture was an exacting pursuit which made it impossible for a landowner to leave his estate at a moment’s notice. Relics of this still persist, for the long vacation of the courts and universities was once necessary to permit bench, bar and litigants to reap and garner their crops and plough their lands. Fixed terms, widely spaced, were designed to enable court work to fit in with agricultural work.³

With the growing complication of society, law had to deal with people who could not be reached quickly, if at all, by means of a procedure directed against land—with people, that is to say, who could not be identified with certain acres. Similarly, there were matters which could best be settled by securing the prompt personal attendance of parties, and by giving them direct personal commands to act or to desist in certain matters. The common law rarely achieved anything so logically direct as this action in personam, simply because its main pre-occupation was real property, and in that particular subject it was as convenient to reach a man by attacking his land, as later admiralty found it useful to reach a man by attacking his ship.

Again, the common law was slow to admit the evidence of parties and witnesses. There was in fact little need for such evidence in the early days of the common law, for its main concern was with records and documents (to which it attached exaggerated importance) or else with such publicly notorious facts as seisin, which were better proved by a jury than by the interested statements of parties or their friends. For minor matters where no deeds were used compurgation was good enough. Here again, the development of law beyond the confines of real property made it desirable to collect evidence, especially from the parties themselves. How useful this could be was apparent from the success with which the canonists were using written depositions.

If any further reason for using such a method were needed, it could be found by observing the decline of the jury. Especially in the fifteenth century there are complaints that juries were packed, bribed, intimidated, partial and difficult to obtain within any reasonable space of time. Distrust of juries is an important factor in the early popularity of equity courts.

Finally, there were those who favoured as a remedy to all this the direct business methods of the administrator. They felt that there were cases which could not be satisfactorily handled by the common law with its writs, its delays, its pleadings, its limited resources in the finding of facts and the awarding of judgment, and its weakness in the face of disorder and corruption. The abandonment of court forms and the substitution of executive methods, moreover, brought with it other consequences. Some of the substantive rules of the common law, defensible enough when considered purely from a technical point of view, seemed unjust to the unlearned who had to suffer from them, and so we need not be surprised that there grew up a desire for more equitable rules as well as more effective procedure.