Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/593

REVIEWS. 573 This volume illustrates another tendency of the society, the publication of matter of little legal value, though interesting to a student of the con- stitutional history of England. Since this volume appeared we know a good deal more than before about that obscure body, the Court of Re- quests ; we know something more about the life of common people in the Tudor period ; but we do not know a particle more about the history of English law. Perhaps the rolls of the King's Courts alone would inform us, and the Society cannot be constantly occupied with those rolls. The Court of Requests was the " poor man's court " of equity, the civil side of the Star Chamber. It took its procedure from the civil law, and sent out commissions to magistrates to take testimony. In the files of the court is a mass of testimony, taken on interrogatories, parts of which form the most valuable portion of the records here published. The court is chiefly of importance as having been involved in a quarrel as to jurisdiction with the Common Pleas and the King's Bench ; a merry war of injunction and prohibition marked the reign of James, and the court finally fell with the first Charles. The apologist for the Court of Requests was the great lawyer, Sir Julius Caesar, for many years a Master of Requests. He derived the jurisdiction of the Court from the Privy Council, of which it claimed to be an offshoot. The King in Council, according to this opinion, still had plenary power to establish new courts by a process that reminds one of the budding and the cellular growth of polyps. The common lawyers, on the other hand, held that all courts must be by custom, statute, or ancient grant, and that the Court of Re- quests was an unconstitutional novelty. "The Judges of the Court of Whitehall," said the Common Bench, " have none authoritie either to sitt there or to comitt any man from thence." Coke discharged on Habeas Corpus one held for contempt of the Requests, and ordered him to bring an action for false imprisonment. Notwithstanding this double severity, the Requests continued to grow in the sunshine of court favor, and only fell with the fall of Prerogative at the civil war. The most important cases of which the records are here published had to do with the efforts of tenants to establish against their lords the ancient customs of manors. The disorders of the War of the Roses and the dissolution of the monasteries seriously wrenched the land-laws. Manors lost alternately their freehold and their copyhold tenants, until every occupant was treated by his lord as a tenant at will, and the lord was likely to be able to defend such treatment in a court of law. The Court of Requests was regarded as more favorable to tenant rights ; and though in the cases here reported the Court seems to have found no method of modifying the law to the tenant's advantage, it exercised a persuasive influence over the landlords, and thus to an extent ameliorated the plaintiffs woes. The other cases seem not to be important. Mr. Leadam's editorial work, as has been said, gives strength and character to the volume. J. H. B. A Sketch of Anne Robert Jacques Turcot. By James M. Barnard. Boston. 1898. pp. 63. Mr. James M. Barnard, of Boston, a gentleman much interested in the improvement of instruction in the law schools of our country, has recently presented to our law library a valuable sketch of Turgot, with various comments upon his character and public services. It contains a letter of