furnish a sufficient answer to the doubt expressed in the former part, the Translator cannot but observe upon the singularity, that none “of the best and ancientest copies” are forthcoming in support of the fact they are said to prove. [Footnote 17: Hist. Hen. II.] [Footnote 18: Selden. opera omnia. 1669.] With respect to the Work itself now submitted to the Public in an English dress, it is said to be the first performance that has any thing like the appearance of a Treatise on the subject of Jurisprudence, since the dissolution of the Roman Empire.[19] But this is not correct, if the Assises of Jerusalem, compiled, as we are informed in the preamble, in 1099—the System of Feudal Law, composed by the two Milanese Lawyers in 1150, and the _Decretum_ of Gratian, published about the same time, be considered as Treatises on Law. It seems, however, to be unquestionable, that the present Treatise is the earliest and most ancient work on the subject of English Jurisprudence, from which any clear and coherent account of it is to be obtained. Dr. Robertson, indeed, informs us, “that in no country of Europe was there at that time, any collection of Customs, nor had any attempt been made to render Law fixed. The first undertaking of that kind was by Glanville, Lord Chief Justice of England, in his _Tractatus de Legibus et consuetudinibus_,[20] composed about the Year 1181.”[21] [Footnote 19: See 1. Reeves’s Hist. Eng. Law. 223.] [Footnote 20: Robertson’s Charles 5. Vol. 1. p. 296.] [Footnote 21: Vide Infra p. 162. Note 2.] It has been thought, that Glanville drew up this compendium of the Laws of England for the public use, by the express command of Henry the Second, a conjecture which, Mr. Madox observes, is not only favored by a certain MS. remaining in the Library of _Corpus Christi_ College, Cambridge, written in a hand of the age of Edward the Second, in which there is a Treatise entituled _Leges Henrici Secundi_, agreeing in many passages with the printed copy of Glanville, but also by the manner of our Author’s writing, especially in the Prologue.[22] There is also in the Cottonian collection a MS. of Glanville, which bears the Title of _Laws of Henry the Second_. But Mr. Reeves informs us, this manner of entituling Treatises was not then uncommon.[23] [Footnote 22: Madox’s Exch. 123. and Note.] [Footnote 23: Reeves’s Hist. Eng. Law. 1. 213.]