Now the Normans, mind you, had purely Roman law.  While they were in Normandy, being in France, they had imbibed or adopted Roman notions of law, perhaps because they were then first civilized.  They had lost their old Saxon notions, if they had any, for they were, after all, of the same race as the Saxons.  Nevertheless, when they conquered England they brought just as much the notion of the Roman law into England as if they had been Caesar’s legions.  And that fact must always be borne in mind, and that led to centuries of conflict in the making of English constitutional law.  The first thing, of course, that they tried to do, that the Norman kings tried to do, was to use law in the Roman way; that is, to make the law themselves, from the king.  For that was another consequence of the Roman law, that not only was it an order by the sovereign power, but that this sovereign power was not in theory a legislature, as it is with us to-day, but the sovereign; in France and the Continental countries laws were made in theory and in practice by the king.  So the Normans came over with the Roman notion, in the first place, as to what law was, that it was a written, newly made order of a sovereign, not a thing that had grown up and was part of the lives and customs of the people, but a thing made out of hand by the king; and, secondly, that it was made by the king and not by any legislature.  And the first two or three centuries of English parliamentary history were mainly taken up, in the English Parliament, so far as it concerns the subject of our course here, in the contest between Parliament and the king as to who should make law and what law was.  It took more than one century for the Parliament, after the Norman Conquest, to revive as a Parliament at all; then when it did finally get together it took two or three centuries before it established the principle that it had anything to do with the making of law.  The Norman kings regarded the Parliament as a mere method of getting money from the people, hardly even as a Council when they sought for popular support; and yet it was through the fact that they so regarded Parliament that Parliament was enabled ultimately to acquire the law-making or the legislative power which exists in all our legislatures to-day.  The king, in those days, derived his revenue mainly from his own land.  It was not necessary for the government to have any revenue except for what we should call the king’s private purse.  What was wanted for public expense was for two or three well-recognized purposes, all purposes of defence.  The old English taxation system was in a sense no system.  There wasn’t any such thing as taxation.  There was the “threefold necessity” as it was called.  It was necessary for the king to have money, horses, grain, supplies, etc., to defend the kingdom, and to build forts, and to maintain bridges or defensive works; and that was the only object of taxation in those times.  Those were the only