GREAT BRITAIN. There has not been in England any general codification in the mod ern sense.
There were some early English so-called codes which were of the former character. The first code in England appears to have been about the year 600 by Athelbert, king of the Kentings. His laws have come down to us only in a copy made after the Norman Conquest. They consist of ninety brief sen tences. In the end of the 7th century the west Saxons had written laws,—the laws of Ine. The next legislator is Alfred the Great, about two centuries later. Later came the code of Cnute. 1 Social England 165.
These are merely of historical interest. But in recent years there has been in Eng land as elsewhere an interest in the subject of the arrangement, classification, and plification of the law which found expres sion not only in words but in legislative action. The necessity for some reform, and the conditions which have forced the sub sect upon the attention of the English Bar and Parliament, are well expressed by Mr.
Crackanthorpe in his address before the Amer. Bar Assoc. (1896): "We have in our libraries a number of mono graphs, dealing with the subheads of Law in the most minute detail—books on Torte and Contracts, on Settlements and Wills, on Purchases and Sales, on Specific Performance, on Negotiable Instru ments, and so forth. We have also many valuable compendia, or Institutional treatises, dealing with the Law as a whole. Each and all of these, how ever, bear witness to the disjointed character of our Jurisprudence. The numerous monographs overlap and jostle each other, like so many rudderless boats tossing at random on the surface of a wind-swept lake, while the institutional treatises. in their en deavor to be exhaustive, fail in paint of logical ar rangement, just as a vessel overladen with a mixed cargo fails to get it properly stowed away in the hold. Some day, perhaps, we shall produce a Corpus Juris which will reduce our legal wilderness to or der, and, by grubbing up the decayed trees, enable us to discern the living forest. We have already di
gested with success portions of our civil law, nota bly that relating to bills of exchange and a part of that relating to partnership and trusts. These ex periments are likely to be renewed from time to time, and I doubt not that ultimately we shall have a civil code as complete as that which has just been promulgated in Germany. At present we have not even a criminal code such as you have in the State of New York and as is to be found in most conti nental countries, all that has been done in that di rection being to pass five consolidating statutes dealing with larceny and a few other common of fences." In addition to those mentioned the partial codes thus far adopted in England include the Bills of Sale Act, the Employers' Lia bility Act, and others, and the India code is the result of a very successful effort to codify specific titles of the common law, and it is now constantly referred to in common-law jurisdictions as the best con sidered expression of the rules of the com mon law on subjects covered by it at the time of its adoption. In addition to the partial or special English codes referred to, the course which the discussion upon codi fication has taken in that country has led to the systematic collection and revision of statutes upon particular subjects. Under the direction of Lord Cairns, the statutes of England from 1 Henry III. have been sys tematically revised by a committee, and published as the "Revised Statutes." In other British dependencies there have been movements in the direction of codification more pronounced in some instances than those in Eng land. In Hong Kong and at the Straits Settlements codes of civil procedure were adopted on the lines of the New York code, which was also utilized in the Indian code.
The English Judicature Acts of i.873 and 1875 ac complished many of the reforms in the line of sim plification. Its chief merit was the fusion of law and equity.