RELIGIOUS LAWS. [XIII. Alfred, Canute, and Ethelred only affect our subject so far as they operated on the common law of the country in such matters as tithes, observance of holy days, and the like; they do not become by themselves a part of the later church law. On the Continent there is this difference :—the Theodosian code had to a great extent won its way over Western Europe; it enters into the codes of the barbarians, into the law of the Pays du droit écrit, and into the canon law of France; the capitularies of Charles the Great and his successors, even to a greater extent than the Anglo-Saxon laws, combine ecclesiastical with secular dooms; and such of them as are accepted find their way into the Church law. But, over and above this infiltration, comes the necessary requirement of developing jurisprudence. The New Testament, the canons of the General Councils, the Penitentials, the Decretals, did not invent new systems of procedure. Where the Roman courts existed they became the model of the Church courts, and where they did not the ecclesiastical procedure followed the lines of the national and customary tribunals. Hence, wherever the Theodosian code spread, it carried the Roman procedure as a part of church administration; where, as in England, only faint scintillas of the civil law were to be found, the Church courts must have proceeded on much the same rules as the popular courts. And this is a matter to be seriously noted as we reach the critical point of the Norman Conquest. It is true we know very little about ecclesiastical procedure before this date, and what we do know is not very clear; we may however affirm pretty confidently that there was, over and above the strictly private discipline of the Confessional, a system of church judicature with properly designated judges, and a recognised though not well-defined area of subject-matter in persons and things. T o put it very briefly, sacred persons and sacred things, men in orders, monks and