result. There were four judges who heard the case, of whom three
gave their opinions.[Footnote: Coggs _v._ Bernard, Lord
Raymond's Reports, 909.] Two of these opinions were confined to
the precise point of law on which the case turned. In the third,
Chief Justice Holt seized the opportunity to lay down the law of
England as to all sorts of contracts arising out of the reception
by one man of the goods of another. This he did mainly by
setting forth what were the rules of the Roman law on the
subject, but not referring to their Roman origin, and quoting
them, so far as he could, from Bracton, an English legal writer
of the thirteenth century, who had also stated them as English
law.

For four or five centuries these rules had been laid down in an
unofficial treatise, but the courts had not fully recognized
them. Now the Chief Justice of England had given such
recognition in the amplest manner. Meanwhile the trade of
England had reached a point at which some definite rules on all
these matters had become of the utmost importance. The bar were
only too glad to advise their clients in accordance with Lord
Holt's opinion. It was not long before it was universally
practiced upon, and no case in the English language touching
contract relations of that nature is of greater importance as a
precedent. Yet it became such not because of its intrinsic
authority as a judgment, so much as on account of its orderly and
scientific statement of a whole body of law of a kind that the
people needed and for the origin of which--whether at Rome or
London--they cared little, so long as it had been accepted by the
highest judicial authority in the realm.