especially if he was a Whig, was our superiority to our
great-grandfathers. There was plenty of room for virtuous indignation.
But less attention was generally paid to the really interesting
problems, how our ancestors came to adopt and to be content with these
institutions; what precisely the institutions were, and how they were
connected with other parts of the social framework. When an advance is
made towards the solution of such problems, and when we see how closely
they connect themselves with other problems, social, ecclesiastical, and
industrial, as well as political, we are making also a step towards an
intelligent appreciation of the real meaning of history. It is more than
a collection of anecdotes, or even, as Carlyle put it, than the essence
of a multitude of biographies; it becomes a study of the growth of an
organic structure; and although Fitzjames was reluctant, even to excess,
to put forward any claim to be a philosophical historian, a phrase too
often applied to a dealer in 'vague generalities,' I think that such
work as his was of great service in providing the data for the truly
philosophical historian who is always just on the eve of appearing.

I venture to touch upon one or two points with the purpose of suggesting
in how many ways the history becomes involved in topics interesting to
various classes of readers, from the antiquary to the student of the
development of thought. The history of trial by jury had, of course,
been already unravelled by previous historians. Fitzjames was able,
however, to produce quaint survivals of the old state of things, under
which a man's neighbours were assumed to be capable of deciding his
guilt or innocence from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of
Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might
catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods
worth 13-1/2_d._ in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive
guillotine without troubling the judges. Even in 1880 there existed (and
I presume there still exists) a certain 'liberty of the Savoy,' under
the shadow of the new courts of justice, which can deal with keepers of
disorderly houses after the same fashion.[177] From this primitive
institution Fitzjames has to grope his way by scanty records to show
how, during the middle ages, the jury ceased to be also witnesses and
became judges of fact informed by witnesses. Emerging into the period of
the Tudors a