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But the English court had now become the centre of a distinctly secular literature. The treatise of Ranulf de Glanvill, a justiciar of Henry the Second, is the earliest work on English law, as that of the royal treasurer, Richard Fitz-Neal, on the Exchequer is the earliest on English government.
Sir John Glanvill, a noted lawyer, and one of the Judges of the Common Pleas. Sergeant Glanvill, his son; as great a lawyer as his father. Sir John Maynard, an eminent lawyer of later years; one of the Commissioners of the Great Seal under King William III. All these three were born at Tavistock. Sir Peter King, the present Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. And many others.
This rampant and mischievous nonsense was dear to the psychical inquirers of the Restoration; it was circulated by Glanvill, a Fellow of the Royal Society; by Henry More; by Sinclair, a professor in the University of Glasgow; by Richard Baxter, that glory of Nonconformity, who revels in the burning of an 'old reading parson' that is, a clergyman who read the Homilies, under the Commonwealth.
It almost seems as if his first thought after the death of his eldest son was that now there was an opportunity of providing for his youngest. He sent to Ranulf Glanvill, justiciar of England, to bring John over to Normandy, and on their arrival he sent for Richard and proposed to him to give up Aquitaine to his brother and to take his homage for it.
The cases in which this mode of trial was used appear from the early books and reports to have been almost wholly confined to claims arising out of a sale or loan. And the question at once occurs, whether we are not upon traces of an institution which was already ancient when Glanvill wrote.
It will be remembered that in the reign of Henry II. most simple contracts and debts for which there was not the evidence of deed or witness were left to be enforced by the ecclesiastical courts, so far as their jurisdiction extended. /2/ Perhaps it was this circumstance which led Glanvill and his successors to apply the terminology of the civilians to common-law debts.
Greatrix and another lusty man clapt their hands over his shoulders, one of them before, and the other behind, and weighed him down with all their strength, but he was forcibly taken up from them; for a considerable time he was carried in the air to and fro, over their heads, several of the company still running under him, to prevent him receiving hurt if he should fall; so says Glanvill.
In early times we read of the gift of an organ by Bishop Gilbert de Glanvill and that, during the terrible visitation of Simon de Montfort's troops, the "organs were raised in the voice of weeping." Such casual references are all that we find before the seventeenth century. In 1634, however, Archbishop Laud is informed of a recent great expenditure on the "making of the organs."
The second part of Glanvill's Sadducismus Triumphatus is full of these depositions. For a full account of this affair see Glanvill's Sadducismus Triumphatus, pt. ii, preface and Relation I. Glanvill had investigated the matter and had diligently collected all the evidence. He was familiar also with what the "deriders" had to say, and we can discover their point of view from his answers.
Why did they leave out the very essential of the witch-monger's lore? All this needed to be urged at a time when the advocates of witchcraft were crying "Wolf! wolf!" to the Christian people of England. In other words, Webster was rendering it possible for the purely orthodox to give up what Glanvill had called a bulwark of religion and still to cling to their orthodoxy.
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