A Reception there was not to be, nor dare I say that a Reception was what our Regius Professor or his royal patron desired. As to Smith himself, it is fairly evident that some time afterwards, when he had resigned his chair and was Elizabeth’s ambassador at the French court, he was well content to contrast the public law of England with that of ‘France, Italy, Spain, Germany and all other countries which’ to use his words ‘do follow the civil law of the Romans compiled by Justinian into his Pandects and Code[35].’ The little treatise on the Commonwealth of England which he wrote at Toulouse in 1565--a remarkable feat for he had no English books at hand[36]--became a classic in the next century, and certainly did not underrate those traditional, medieval, Germanic and parliamentary elements which were still to be found in English life and law under the fifth and last of the Tudors. Nevertheless I think that a well-equipped lecturer might persuade a leisurely audience to perceive that in the second quarter of the sixteenth century the continuity of English legal history was seriously threatened[37]. Unquestionably our medieval law was open to humanistic attacks. It was couched partly in bad Latin, partly in worse French. For the business Latin of the middle age there is much to be said. It is a pleasant picture that which we have of Thomas More puzzling the omniscient foreigner by the question ‘An averia carucae capta in withernamio sunt irreplegibilia[38].’ He asked a practical question in the only Latin in which that question could have been asked without distortion. Smith’s acute glance saw that _withernamium_ must have something to do with the German _wiedernehmen_; for among his other pursuits our professor had interested himself in the study of English words[39]. But this business Latin was a pure and elegant language when compared with what served our lawyers as French. Pole and Smith might well call it barbarous; that it was fast becoming English was its one redeeming feature. You are likely to know what I must not call the classical passage: it comes from the seventeenth century. In all the _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_ there is nothing better than the report which tells how one of Sir Robert Rede’s successors was assaulted by a prisoner ‘que puis son condemnation ject un brickbat a le dit justice que narrowly mist[40].’ It is as instructive as it is surprising that this jargon should have been written in a country where Frenchmen had long been regarded as hereditary foes. This prepares us for the remark that taught law is tough law. But when ‘Dunce’ had been set in Bocardo (and it was a doctor of the civil law who set him there[41]), why should the old law books be spared? They also were barbarous; they also were sufficiently papistical.