The " Canterbury Tales " and Our Early Legal History. to recover a slave, to make use of the exact procedure of the court of chancery? It is curious, too, that the chancellor is invariably called a "judge," suggesting that in the pub lic mind the chancellor occupied the posi tion of a judge. For instance : — This false juge, as telleth us the story, As, he was wont, sat in his consistory" Mark the use of this last word, which could have no reference to any but the chancellor's court, and affords further evi dence of the correctness of the accepted view, that the origin of the chancellor's office was from that of the president of the consistory court of the bishop. Then, again, the plea of Claudius is not unlike a versified form of one of the ordinary chan cery bills of the period, and it is, moreover, twice called by Chaucer a " bille: " — "And right anoon was red this cursed bille; To yow, my lord, sire Apius so deere, Scheweth youre pore servaunt Claudius, How that a knight called Virginius Ageyns the lawe, ageytts alle eqiiyty, Holdeth expresse ageynst the wille of me My servaunt, which that my thral is by right," etc. It is interesting, too, that Chaucer does not use the term " slave " which he must have seen in the original MS. from which he drew his story; we find "servaunt," "thral," but no where "slave." Does this indicate that even at this early period the idea of slavery was quite foreign to the English people, and that he translated the word in this way to be better understood by his readers? It is true Virginia is treated very much like a chattel, but here another question arises; why did not Chaucer represent Claudius as appealing to a common law court? A lawyer of that period would obviously, to recover a chattel, have laid his action in a common law court, and these courts were supposed to be spec ially favored by the people at that time, for one of the most frequent petitions to the king in Parliament was to restrain the juris diction of the chancellor. There are nu merous instances, too, of the rights of feudal
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lords to their villeins regardant being tried in these courts, and the term "thral" indi cates that the poet regarded the position of Virginia somewhat in the light of a feudal thrall, and the last action of this kind took place in the reign of James I, when every trace of this right was declared obsolete by a legal decision. In Chaucer's time, however, there was a regular machinery in the common law courts for vindicating feudal rights of this nature, and, therefore, it is the more strange that he should have chosen to de pict the procedure of the court of chan cery as the means by which Claudius claimed the restitution of an alleged stolen slave. The only explanation I can suggest for this, which, doubtless to some may seem far fetched, is that Chaucer considered that the villeinage of English feudal law was a very different thing from slavery, and, therefore, that a claim such as Claudius' was unknown to the English common law, and that it seemed more natural that such a claim should be made to the chancellor, who was not so rigidly bound down by rules of law. Whether there be anything in this con jecture or not, I think all will agree with me, that the way in which the " Doctour of Physik " endeavors to translate into English form the judicial proceedings before the Roman Decemviri is not uninteresting to the student of our early law. Lastly, we come to the Sompnour's Tale, and here we may note many points of inter est, both in our early legal and social his tory. In the first place, who was the Sompnour? Chaucer chooses him as one of the typical constituents of society of those days alongside with the knight, the lawyer and the doctor,.so that he must have been well known to our forefathers. His name is a contraction of " summoner," and he was the officer of the ecclesiastical court, who brought the "citations," or writs of sum mons to those who came under its jurisdiction; for it must not be forgotten that the ecclesiastical courts, or courts Christian,
