e of little provinces, governed
by peculiar customs. As in Portugal, under king Edward, about the
beginning of the fifteenth century[k]. In Spain under Alonzo X, who
about the year 1250 executed the plan of his father St. Ferdinand, and
collected all the provincial customs into one uniform law, in the
celebrated code entitled _las partidas_[l]. And in Sweden about the
same aera, a universal body of common law was compiled out of the
particular customs established by the laghman of every province, and
intitled the _land's lagh_, being analogous to the _common law_ of
England[m].

[Footnote g: _in Hen. II._]

[Footnote h: _in Edw. Confessor._]

[Footnote i: _in Seld. ad Eadmer._ 6.]

[Footnote k: Mod. Un. Hist. xxii. 135.]

[Footnote l: Ibid. xx. 211.]

[Footnote m: Ibid. xxxiii. 21, 58.]

BOTH these undertakings, of king Edgar and Edward the confessor, seem
to have been no more than a new edition, or fresh promulgation, of
Alfred's code or dome-book, with such additions and improvements as
the experience of a century and an half had suggested. For Alfred is
generally stiled by the same historians the _legum Anglicanarum
conditor_, as Edward the confessor is the _restitutor_. These however
are the laws which our histories so often mention under the name of
the laws of Edward the confessor; which our ancestors struggled so
hardly to maintain, under the first princes of the Norman line; and
which subsequent princes so frequently promised to keep and to
restore, as the most popular act they could do, when pressed by
foreign emergencies or domestic discontents. These are the laws, that
so vigorously withstood the repeated attacks of the civil law; which
established in the twelfth century a new Roman empire over most of the
states on the continent: states that have lost, and perhaps upon that
account, their political liberties; while the free constitution of
England, perhaps upon the same account, has been rather improved than
debased. These, in short, are the laws which gave rise and original to
that collection of maxims and customs, which is now known by the name
of the common law. A name either given to it, in contradistinction to
other laws, as the statute law, the civil law, the law merchant, and
the like; or, more probably, as a law _common_ to all the realm, the
_jus commune_ or _folcright_ mentioned by king Edward the elder, after
the abolition of the several provincial customs and particular laws
beforementi