while ago, is a poet as well as a student and a ruler
of men.
And it was with deep and wide meaning
that the greatest poet of modern Europe proclaimed
under the figure of Helena the glory of the arts and
sciences inherited from Greece by the modern world.
His meaning was wide enough, I am assured, to
include even the learning that seems harsh and
crabbed to many who are not fools. We of the
Faculty of Law may claim and maintain, no less
than our colleagues in the Humanities, our part in
the favour of the Muses and the splendour of the
ideal beauty perceived by true poets and philosophers
from Plato to Goethe; and the least of us may thereby
feel, as in that vision of Goethe the warder seeing the
face of Helena, that our service is a delight:-

Schwach ist, was der Herr befiehlt,
Thut's der Diener, es ist gespielt :
Herrscht doch über Gut und Blut

Dieser Schönheit Uebermuth.
Schon das ganze Heer ist zahm,
Alle Schwerter stumpf und lahm,
Vor der herrlichen Gestalt
Selbst die Sonne matt und kalt,
Vor dem Reichthum des Gesichts
Alles leer und Alles nichts.

III

THE KING'S PEACE1

"AGAINST the peace of Our Lady the Queen, her crown and dignity." This formula was once the necessary conclusion, as it is still the accustomed one,

of

every indictment for a criminal offence preferred before the Queen's justices. Even to those who have nothing to do with assizes or quarter sessions the Queen's Peace is a familiar term. By the widely spread office of justice of the peace it is brought home to the remotest corners of England. And it seems to us a natural thing that throughout the realm peace should be kept-in other words that unlawful force should be prevented and punishedin the Queen's name and by officers armed with her authority. This does not look, on the face of it, like a fact requiring any special explanation. Our conception of an executive power, under whatever names and in whatever forms it is exercised, is that its first business is to preserve order. And that this power should be one and uniform in every part of a land ruled by the same laws appears to us so far from

1 A Public Lecture delivered in the University of Oxford, May 24, 1884.

F

remarkable that anything contrary to it has the air of a puzzle and an anomaly. Such is our modern point of view, too obvious (one would think) to be worth stating. Yet it is so modern that there was demonstrably a time when it was an innovation. It belongs to the political theory of sovereignty which has superseded the feudal theory of autonomous personal allegiance. It assumes that the rights of private feud and war, rights exercised without contradiction far into the Middle Ages, are for us intolerable and impossible. It assumes, moreover, that a central authority has become strong enough to subdue local competition and jealousy. These conditions have been brought about in Western Christendom only by long processes of growth, strife, and decay. Perhaps examples might be assigned of lands and institutions where even yet they are not wholly fulfilled. The establishment of the king's peace is a portion, and in England no small one, of the historical transformation which has given us the modern in the place of the medieval State. In the history of our law the steps are singularly well marked, and for that reason are worth our dwelling on. A clearly traced example in detail will assist our grasp of the general process.

Before we consider our English evidences, it is well to remember what is the state of things to which the king's peace is opposed. Modern as is the particular development to which I call your attention, both the need and the remedy were understood at a time ancient enough for the most exacting definition

of antiquity. "In those days," says the chronicler in the Book of Judges, "there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes." And he explains his meaning by the case of Micah of Mount Ephraim, who "had an house of gods, and made an ephod, and teraphim," and by good fortune retained a wandering Levite, and knew that the Lord would do him good, seeing he had a Levite to his priest. But the tribe of Dan, or some clan of them, were seeking a place to dwell in, and their spies lodged in Micah's house, and took note of the images and the Levite. They also saw the city of Laish, and the people that were therein, "how they dwelt careless, after the manner of the Zidonians, quiet and secure," and reported to their brethren that it was an easy and desirable conquest, "a place where there is no want of anything that is in the earth." Whereupon the men of Dan set forth, six hundred men appointed with weapons of war, and, coming on their way to Micah's house, carried off the graven image, and the ephod, and the teraphim, and the molten image. The priest was easily persuaded to follow. "Is it better for thee to be a priest unto the house of one man, or that thou be a priest unto a tribe and a family in Israel?" We hear nothing of Micah till the raiders were well on their way. But he then appears as doing exactly what, according to English law and usage of the twelfth or thirteenth century, he ought to have done. He raised the hue and cry, and pursued with as many of his neighbours as he could assemble.

"And when they were a good way from the house of Micah, the men that were in the houses near to Micah's house were gathered together, and overtook the children of Dan. And they cried unto the children of Dan. And they turned their faces, and said unto Micah, What aileth thee, that thou comest with such a company? And he said, Ye have taken away my gods which I made, and the priest, and ye are gone away: and what have I more? and what is this that ye say unto me, What aileth thee? And the children of Dan said unto him, Let not thy voice be heard among us, lest angry fellows run upon thee, and thou lose thy life, with the lives of thy household. And the children of Dan went their way and when Micah saw that they were too strong for him, he turned and went back unto his house.'

Fortified by the possession of the idols and a real priest of the sacred tribe, the expedition went on to accomplish its main purpose. "And they took the things which Micah had made, and the priest which he had, and came unto Laish, unto a people that were at quiet and secure and they smote them with the edge of the sword, and burnt the city with fire." They then built a new city, whereof the graven image from Micah's house became the tutelar idol or Palladium. The story of its capture was preserved, one may suppose, as a tribal tradition, without any notion that the six hundred men appointed with weapons of war deserved anything but praise for their successful conduct of the enterprise. Such was right