the Great Council or the King's Council, and in Saxon times the
Witenagemot.

Then we come down to the Statute of Westminster I. That is considered
a great landmark in statutory legislation mainly because it is the
first attempt to establish a code, or, at least, a large collection of
the laws of England. It is an attempt to put what they supposed to be
a good part of them into writing. We have no codes in this country,
as a rule; nor to-day in England; the ordinary Anglo-Saxon does
not believe in codes. It is the French and Germans who have codes.
Nevertheless, you often find collections of statutes. It is important
not to confound these things with codes, because they never pretend to
be complete. Many States in this country never make revision of the
statutes. Nevertheless, every ten or twenty years they will print a
collection of the statutes arranged alphabetically. In some States, as
in Massachusetts, those collections are official; but in other
States they are simply matters of private enterprise. They are of no
authority, and if they are wrong it is no protection to you. You are
bound to know the laws. These early so-called codes, especially this
code of Edward I, although it caused him to be called the English
Justinian, because it was the first attempt of putting any large
body of the Anglo-Saxon laws in writing at all, are still not at all
_codes_ in the technical sense. This one was merely a collection of a
certain number of laws reduced to writing and re-enacted by Edward I.
We note here the phrase "common right shall be done to rich and poor,"
rather an interesting landmark; it shows what progress was being made
by the people in establishing their rights as freemen and to equal
laws. For the laws of Norman England mainly applied to land-owners,
and were made by the barons, the only people that had property; there
was but a small class in those early days between the land-owners and