were its provisions permitted to stand where they came into conflict with the statute law of England; yet it served as the groundwork upon which the English Canonists John of Ayton and Lyndwood worked, and a knowledge of it was part of the equipment of an ecclesiastical lawyer. Further, we are told that 'very much of the ecclesiastical law,' after as well as before the conquest, 'was customary;' that the declaration of the law still remained in the mouth of the judge, who 'declared it out of his own knowledge and experience, without reference to any authoritative text;' that the judge was either the bishop or his nominee, and before the end of the Conqueror's reign nearly all the sees were filled by 'foreign bishops to whom all that was national and insular in the Church law of England was entirely strange;'[1] that if the judge erred 'his error could be corrected at Rome if the suitor was able to reach the supreme court of Church judicature there;' that the archdeacons, the early substitutes for bishops as judges, were mostly educated at foreign universities. All these taken together make it a difficult matter to resist the conclusion that Roman canon law became practically the Church law of England, except in the few cases in which local custom held its own because it was worth no one's while to upset it, or in those in which it came into actual conflict with the statute law of the State. This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that the procedure in the new ecclesiastical courts, which at first appears to have had a tendency to retain its own præ-Norman form, was after a brief period 'adapted to the customary procedure of the Roman law,'[2] and that a regular system of appeals to Rome was established, which Henry II. and other sovereigns were able to restrain
