BUT the common law of England, being not committed to writing, but only handed down by tradition, use, and experience, was not so heartily relished by the foreign clergy; who came over hither in shoals during the reign of the conqueror and his two sons, and were utter strangers to our constitution as well as our language. And an accident, which soon after happened, had nearly completed it's ruin. A copy of Justinian's pandects, being newly[u] discovered at Amalfi, soon brought the civil law into vogue all over the west of Europe, where before it was quite laid aside[w] and in a manner forgotten; though some traces of it's authority remained in Italy[x] and the eastern provinces of the empire[y]. This now became in a particular manner the favourite of the popish clergy, who borrowed the method and many of the maxims of their canon law from this original. The study of it was introduced into several universities abroad, particularly that of Bologna; where exercises were performed, lectures read, and degrees conferred in this faculty, as in other branches of science: and many nations on the continent, just then beginning to recover from the convulsions consequent upon the overthrow of the Roman empire, and settling by degrees into peaceable forms of government, adopted the civil law, (being the best written system then extant) as the basis of their several constitutions; blending and interweaving it among their own feodal customs, in some places with a more extensive, in others a more confined authority[z]. [Footnote u: _circ. A.D._ 1130.] [Footnote w: _LL. Wisigoth._ 2. 1. 9.] [Footnote x: _Capitular. Hludov. Pii._ 4. 102.] [Footnote y: Selden _in Fletam._ 5. 5.] [Footnote z: Domat's treatise of laws. c. 13. Sec. 9. _Epistol. Innocent. IV. in M. Paris. ad A.D._ 1254.]