and _testament_ are a few more examples of the same process, chosen from a great many. Naturally many of these words came into the English language just after the Conquest. The French, being so much nearer to Rome, both in blood and in space, were a century or two ahead of the Teutons in their civilization, and the Normans, after their long sojourn on the Continent, brought with them to England quite a complicated system of legislature and executive. Besides the Latin words to which we have referred, there are a large number of legal terms which are not so easily recognizable as Latin, having passed through Late Latin, Low Latin, and Early French colloquial speech before they reached our shores. In some cases they only developed a specifically legal sense in Late Latin or even Early French. Yet because the whole spirit of Roman civilization had been so impregnated with legalism, the capacity for expressing exact legal ideas seems to have remained latent, through all their curious vicissitudes, in such words as _assize_ (literally ‘a sitting down’), _court_, _judge_, _jury_, _county_, _district_, _manor_, _rent_,... Lawyers have gone on employing a queer kind of Anglo-French, in some cases, right down to the present day. The official use of “Law French” in legal documents was only recently abandoned, and such technical terms as _champerty_, _feme sole_, _tort_, ... survive to remind us of the days when an English-speaking lawyer would naturally write such a sentence as: Arsons de measons felonisement faits est felony per le comen ley. (Arson of houses committed with felonious intent is felony by the common law.) _Convey_, _felon_, _forfeit_, _lease_, _mortgage_, _perjury_, _plaintiff_, and _defendant_, on the other hand, have acquired a somewhat more general use; and indeed this Frenchified jargon, partly imported and partly built up by English lawyers as they went along, has produced in later times several words which the language as a whole would find it hard to do without. Among them are _assets_ (French ‘assez’), _burglar_, _cancel_, _conventional_, _disclaim_, _flotsam_ and _jetsam_, _jettison_, _improve_, _matter-of-fact_, _mere_, “the _premises_”, _realize_, _size_, and—in its modern sense—_franchise_; while _culprit_, which was used in court down to the eighteenth century, has an interesting history of its own. In former days, when the prisoner had pleaded “Not Guilty”, the Clerk of the Crown would open proceedings by saying “Culpable: prest”, meaning that the prisoner _is_ “guilty”, and I am “ready” to prove it. In the official records of the case this formula was abbreviated, first to ‘cul-prest’ and afterwards to ‘cul-prit’, until later clerks formed the habit of running the two words together.