102 (Thompson 1993, 34-35)
(Thompson 1993, 34-35)
...
Thirdly, there is "the Law", elevated during this century to a role more prominent than at any other period of our history, and serving as the "impartial", arbitrating authority in place of a weak and unenlightened monarchy, a corrupt bureaucracy and a democracy which offered to the real intrusions of power little more than rhetoric about its ancestry. The civil law afforded to the competing interests both a set of defences to their property and those rules of the game without which all would have fallen into anarchy. The higher institutions of the law were not free from influence and corruption, but they were freer from these than was any other profession. To maintain their credibility, the courts must sometimes find for the small man against the great, the subject against the King. In terms of style, the performance was superb: serene, untainted by influence, remote from the hubbub of affairs, lucid, combining a reverence for the precedents of antiquity with a flexible assimilation of the present. Money, of course, could buy the best performers, and the longer purse could often exhaust the lesser; but money could never effect an outright purchase of judgement, and on occasion was visibly discomfited. The civil law provided a fair framework within which the predators could fight for some kinds of spoil: for tithes, for claims to timber and common land, over legacies and entails: on occasion their lesser victims could defend themselves in the same medium.
