Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Each of these parlements was sovereign in its own sphere and Ch. I. independent of the parlement of Paris; and each developed a jurisprudence of its own. Thus the chief factor which made for unity of law in England, the all-pervading influence of the courts at Westminster, was absent in France. The personal laws of the several Teutonic tribes had become Cus- territorial customs, which remained separate, although they LaTin fell into two main groups, corresponding with the regions France- which became known as the pays de coutumes and the pays de droit ecrit, and were bounded approximately by the line separating the northern dialects of the langue d'o'il from the southern dialects of the langue d'oo1. In the pays de droit ecrit, which had been more completely and permanently Romanized, Roman law continued to be the common law, and in the course of the last three centuries of the old regime overwhelmed and destroyed the local customs which had grown up in particular places. The only branch of law which it did not succeed in displacing was the feudal law of rights relating to land. In the pays de coutumes, where Teutonic influences were stronger, the common law was custom. But it was a common law with great gaps, which had to be supplied from Roman law. Thus the law of contract was practically Roman. And under the influence of the jurists the principles of Roman law leavened the whole lump. The difficulty of ascertaining the customary law, and the practical inconvenience which ensued, led to a general demand for an authoritative version. The French kings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, particularly Charles VIII and Louis XII, made vigorous and systemat1c efforts to meet this demand. The course ordinarily adopted was this. The principal royal judge of the province was ins...