A whole chapter might be written on the numerous English words whose meanings can be traced back to the usages of Roman law. Take, for instance, the word person. Derived, probably, from an Etruscan word meaning an actor’s mask, person was used by the Roman legislators to describe a man’s personal rights and duties, which were defined according to his position in life. Its present meaning of an individual human being is largely due to the theologians who hit upon it when they were looking for some term that would enable them to assert the trinity of Godhead without admitting more than one “substance”. When we remember for how long a time Latin continued to be the universal written language of educated Europe,[14] the language of history and philosophy as well as of theology, we can imagine how the subtle flavour of this word’s former meaning clung to its syllables through all their ecclesiastical soarings and was ready, as soon as it came to English earth, to assist the brains of our early lawyers in their task of imagining and thus creating that fortunate legal abstraction, the British subject. ‘Obligatio’ in early Latin meant merely the physical binding of someone to something; but in the Roman law of that date a defaulting debtor was literally bound and delivered a prisoner into the hands of his creditor. Thus, when a little later on this crude practice was abandoned, ‘obligatio’ came to mean the duty to pay—a duty which the creditor could now only enforce against his debtor’s property; and in this way the general meaning of our word obligation was developed. Similarly, retaliation came to us from the Latin ‘Lex Talionis’, the latter word being associated with ‘talis’ (such or same) and implying a punishment that fits the crime; while advocate, capital,[15] chattel,[15] classical, contract, emancipate, formula, heir, peculiar, prejudice, private, property, and testament are a few more examples of the same process, chosen from a great many.
Naturally many of these words came into the English language just after the Conquest. The French, being so much nearer to Rome, both in blood and in space, were a century or two ahead of the Teutons in their civilization, and the Normans, after their long sojourn on the Continent, brought with them to England quite a complicated system of legislature and executive. Besides the Latin words to which we have referred, there are a large number of legal terms which are not so easily recognizable as Latin, having passed through Late Latin, Low Latin, and Early French colloquial speech before they reached our shores. In some cases they only developed a specifically legal sense in Late Latin or even Early French. Yet because the whole spirit of Roman civilization had been so impregnated with legalism, the capacity for expressing exact legal ideas seems to have remained latent, through all their curious vicissitudes, in such words as assize (literally ‘a sitting down’), court, judge, jury, county, district, manor, rent,... Lawyers have gone on employing a queer kind of Anglo-French, in some cases, right down to the present day. The official use of “Law French” in legal documents was only recently abandoned, and such technical terms as champerty, feme sole, tort, ... survive to remind us of the days when an English-speaking lawyer would naturally write such a sentence as:
Arsons de measons felonisement faits est felony per le comen ley. (Arson of houses committed with felonious intent is felony by the common law.)
Convey, felon, forfeit, lease, mortgage, perjury, plaintiff, and defendant, on the other hand, have acquired a somewhat more general use; and indeed this Frenchified jargon, partly imported and partly built up by English lawyers as they went along, has produced in later times several words which the language as a whole would find it hard to do without. Among them are assets (French ‘assez’), burglar, cancel, conventional, disclaim, flotsam and jetsam, jettison, improve, matter-of-fact, mere, “the premises”, realize, size, and—in its modern sense—franchise; while culprit, which was used in court down to the eighteenth century, has an interesting history of its own. In former days, when the prisoner had pleaded “Not Guilty”, the Clerk of the Crown would open proceedings by saying “Culpable: prest”, meaning that the prisoner is “guilty”, and I am “ready” to prove it. In the official records of the case this formula was abbreviated, first to ‘cul-prest’ and afterwards to ‘cul-prit’, until later clerks formed the habit of running the two words together.
Looking at such words as cancel, improve, realize, and size, we can feel the force of Professor Maitland’s remark that in the Middle Ages “Law was the point where life and logic met”. It served another purpose besides that of establishing a secure polity; for through it some of the new Latin words which were gradually being created by its own, or translated from Greek, thought by the abstruse scholastic philosophy of the day found their way into the vocabulary of the people. Even the old word cause seems to have reached us by way of the law courts. They were thus the pipe through which a little of that hard thinking by the few, which underpins every great civilization, could flow into the common consciousness of the many, and in their terminology we can see most clearly an example of that never-pausing process by which the speculative metaphysics of yesterday are transformed into the “common sense” of to-day.
CHAPTER IV
MODERN ENGLAND
Sport. Caddie. Cannibal. Tory. Finance.
The English language has been facetiously described as “French badly pronounced”. At the death of Chaucer, and for nearly a hundred years afterwards, this description would have been very nearly a true one. Apart from the adoption of a few Latin words, changes seem to have been few and insignificant during the fifteenth century, and we may assume that, for the first half of it at any rate, the Hundred Years’ War was occupying too many of our energies to leave much time for cultural growth. Nevertheless, from developments such as those which have been pointed out in some of our legal terminology we can feel something of the way in which the genius of the English language was steadily, if slowly, reasserting itself and claiming its right to a separate personality. At the Reformation, when England finally shook herself free from the dangerous embraces of the Holy Roman Empire, the period of excessive French influence came to an end. The general effect of Protestantism on our language, subtle and profound as it has been, will be dealt with later, but the Reformation cannot be passed over here without recording one instance in which a word—perhaps a misunderstood word—has had extraordinarily lasting results. It is the confusion of the English Sunday with the Jewish Sabbath[16] and the consequent fastening upon that day of rest of many of the sombre inhibitions entailed by Sabbatic Law.