Henry Sumner Maine

‘The conclusion,’ I said, ‘arrived at by the persons who seem to me of highest authority is, first, that the codified law—Manu and his glossators—embraced originally a much smaller body of usage than had been imagined;

Two courses of lectures, delivered by the Author while he had the honour of holding the Corpus Professorship of Jurisprudence in the University of Oxford, have been already published with the titles ‘Village-Communities in the East and West,’ and ‘The Early History of Institutions.

The Author continues in these pages the line of investigation which he has followed in former works.

In the Lectures printed in this Volume an attempt is made to carry farther in some particulars the line of investigation pursued by the Author in an earlier work on ‘Ancient Law.

Let it farther be recollected that this law was at first, expanded and developed, not at all, or very slightly, by legislation, but by a process which we may perceive still in operation in various communities—the juridical interpretation of authoritative texts by successive generations of learned men.

Both in the Senchus Mor and in the Book of Aicill the express statement of the law is described as ‘casting a thread of poetry’ about it, and the traditional authors of the Senchus Mor are said to have exhibited ‘all the judgment and poetry of the men of Erin.

It has been thought proper to reprint the text of “Ancient Law” as last revised by Maine not only without alteration, but without the interruption of editorial footnotes.

I have to thank the owners and the editor of the Edinburgh Review for permission to make free use of an article entitled “Sir Henry Maine as a Jurist,” contributed by me in 1893.

” It is worth while to observe Maine’s caution in disclaiming authority to lay down what ancient Edition: