hose
personal law is different.

Gradually the different populations within the same area coalesce, and
law from being personal becomes local. But the local area will not be
the same for all purposes. The law or custom which determines the rights
of the small, often unfree or half-free tenant, whether as between him
and his neighbour or as between him and his lord, may extend no further
than a very small area, such as in England we call a manor. The law by
which great men held their land from a king, though perhaps not uniform
throughout the kingdom, will cover a much larger area. The fact that a
great man may hold land in far distant places, it may be in different
kingdoms, and that men of this class have connexions with different
parts of Western Europe will lead to the formation of common notions of
feudal law, which make possible even the scientific study of a law of
feuds, though no complete uniformity was ever attained.

England was the first western country to attain political unity with a
territory substantially the same as at the present day; and the
determination of the English kings that in the more important matters
justice should be done throughout the land in the king's name, either by
his courts at Westminster or by judges sent by him to the counties,
secured the formation of an English Common Law which left comparatively
little play for local custom, and which at an early time became strong
enough to resist attempts to introduce foreign law. As early as the time
of Henry III the barons proclaimed with one voice that they would not
have the laws of England altered in favour of a rule--the legitimation
of bastards by the subsequent marriage of their parents--which in one
form or another has been adopted in Western Christendom, and even in the
neighbouring kingdom of Scotland.

In France political unity was reached only later and bit by bit, and
when it came the difference of law in the various provinces was too
firmly established to make uniformity possible until the time of the
Revolution. In Germany the shadowy unity of the Holy Roman Empire was
never enough to afford any effective central administration of justice.
National law in the strict sense was impossible under such conditions:
the most that can be expected is such a degree of unity as results from
common traditions inherited from more primitive times, and a community
of language and national feeling.

Amid local and national diversities of l