with the half-blood must always be difficult, and the solution is always likely to be capricious. "The lawyers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had no definite solution, and we strongly suspect that the rule that was ultimately established had its origin in a few precedents...." "Our rule was one eminently favourable to the King; it gave him escheats; we are not sure that any profounder explanation of it would be true." In Maitland's hands a treatise upon antiquarian law became something greater than an antiquarian treatise. It became a contribution to the general history of human society. Even the most superficial reader must be struck by the number of foreign books quoted in the footnotes and by the way in which analogues and contrasts from French and German law are brought in to illustrate the course of our legal history. English law became insular; pursued a course of its own. We avoided torture; we escaped the secret and inquisitorial procedure of the continent; we developed the jury; primogeniture became the general rule among us in case of intestacy; the _retrait lignager_ of the French customs did not become established in our land-law. But just for this reason it was the more necessary to understand the main stream of continental development. Many a rule which, if considered from a purely insular standpoint, might seem part of the natural order, would assume its true character of a deviation from the normal, if viewed in the larger context of European law; many features of our law apparently arbitrary would in that larger context receive explanation. Maitland takes care to know that which was known to Glanvill and Bracton; but he does not for that reason neglect Brunner or Gierke, Esmein or Viollet. A piece of continental evidence suggested by the history of the Inquisition points to the reason why in England alone the public trial of primitive Teutonic civilisation survived through the Middle Ages. It survived because the Inquisition was never introduced into this country, and England had no Inquisition because at the critical period it was singularly unfertile in heresy.