set free.  In other words, he could not be punished.  That doesn’t concern us; but, I suppose, it resulted from the old notion that all priests were subject only to Rome, and to the church courts, and not to the civil law courts; and consequently when a priest was attempted to be tried in a civil law court, it was a way of doing what we should call “pleading to the jurisdiction” of the court.  Later, as time went on, in England it was greatly abused, especially when there got to be clerks who were not priests.  When it meant anybody who could read and write, and anybody who had committed a murder had only to say, “I can read and write,” and be set free, it led to an extraordinary state of things.  So, from time to time, they modified the benefit of the clergy, until ultimately it was abolished entirely; first by not allowing it in high offences like murder; then by imposing certain slight punishment—­they were “burned in the hand”; then by applying it only to the first offence, and so on, until they got rid of it entirely; and this Statute of Marlborough is simply one of the first of that long chain of statutes which finally did away with it and prevented people from getting rid of a criminal prosecution merely because they knew how to read and write or were priests.

In 1275 I note the first use of the word parliament.  I have used it from the beginning, but it is important to remember that the thing was not called parliament until 1275.  Before that it was called the Great Council or the King’s Council, and in Saxon times the Witenagemot.

Then we come down to the Statute of Westminster I. That is considered a great landmark in statutory legislation mainly because it is the first attempt to establish a code, or, at least, a large collection of the laws of England.  It is an attempt to put what they supposed to be a good part of them into writing.  We have no codes in this country, as a rule; nor to-day in England; the ordinary Anglo-Saxon does not believe in codes.  It is the French and Germans who have codes.  Nevertheless, you often find collections of statutes.  It is important not to confound these things with codes, because they never pretend to be complete.  Many States in this country never make revision of the statutes.  Nevertheless, every ten or twenty years they will print a collection of the statutes arranged alphabetically.  In some States, as in Massachusetts, those collections are official; but in other States they are simply matters of private enterprise.  They are of no authority, and if they are wrong it is no protection to you.  You are bound to know the laws.  These early so-called codes, especially this code of Edward I, although it caused him to be called the English Justinian, because it was the first attempt of putting any large body of the Anglo-Saxon laws in writing at all, are still not at all codes in the technical sense.  This one was merely a collection of a certain number of laws reduced to writing and re-enacted by Edward