Exodus, so as to place Alfred's preface to what was really his, awkwardly enough in the body of the work. An interpolation the more glaring, as containing laws expressly contradicted by those of Alfred. This pious fraud seems to have been first noted by Howard, in his _Contumes Anglo Normandes_ (188), and the pious judges of England have had no inclination to question it; [of this disposition in these judges, I could give you a curious sample from a note in my common-place book, made while I was a student, but it is too long to be now copied. Perhaps I may give it to you with some future letter.] This digest of Alfred of the laws of the Heptarchy into a single code, common to the whole kingdom, by him first reduced into one, was probably the birth of what is called the common law. He has been styled, "Magnus Juris Anglicani Conditor;" and his code, the Dom-Dec, or doom-book. That which was made afterwards under Edward the Confessor, was but a restoration of Alfred's, with some intervening alterations. And this was the code which the English so often, under the Norman princes, petitioned to have restored to them. But, all records previous to the _Magna Charta_ having been early lost, Bracton's is the first digest of the whole body of law which has come down to us entire. What materials for it existed in his time we know not, except the unauthoritative collections of Lambard & Wilkins, and the treatise of Glanville, tempore H. 2. Bracton's is the more valuable, because being written a very few years after the _Magna Charta_, which commences what is called the statute law, it gives us the state of the common law in its ultimate form, and exactly at the point of division between the common and statute law. It is a most able work, complete in its matter and luminous in its method. 2. The statutes which introduced changes began now to be preserved; applications of the law to new cases by the courts, began soon after to be reported in the year-books, these to be methodized and abridged by Fitzherbert, Broke, Rolle, and others; individuals continued the business of reporting; particular treatises were written by able men, and all these, by the time of Lord Coke, had formed so large a mass of matter as to call for a new digest, to bring it within reasonable compass. This he undertook in his Institutes, harmonizing all the decisions and opinions which were reconcilable, and rejecting those not so. This work is executed with so much learning and judgment, that I do not recollect that a single position in it has ever been judicially denied. And although the work loses much of its value by its chaotic form, it may still be considered as the fundamental code of the English law.