not improbable that the influence of William Lambard crept into the early local legislation of Massachusetts. At all events, this latter treatise, which describes the freest of English Counties, or the customs of Kent, whence the freehold land tenure of almost every English colony in America was derived, and the former essay on Constables, which describes the parish institutions of the mother country at the time the Puritans came over are both historical monuments deserving not only watchful guardianship, but scientific attention.

The writings of William Lambard represent the most advanced state of English knowledge in the sixteenth century concerning the origin of municipal institutions. The work contains many errors and numerous incorrect etymologies, but these are faults of the time rather than of the man. Practically Lambard was the transmitter if not one of the fathers of English Institutional History. After him, in the reign of James I., came Lords Bacon and Coke and the now forgotten Dr. Cowell, commenting on the laws and Institutes of England, as handed down by Granville, Bracton, Britton, Fleta, Fortescue, Littleton and others. In the reign of Charles II. appeared Sir Matthew Hale with the first regular History of the Common Law. For a century after Hale there was no really monumental treatise on English institutions, with the exception perhaps of Spelman's works and Dr. Wood's Institutes, until the year of the American Stamp Act (1765) when Blackstone's Commentaries were first published. Like all his predecessors, Blackstone was practically and necessarily a compiler. Whatever he had to say regarding the municipal institutions of England, concerning Constables, Tithingmen and Justices of the Peace, he extracted from older writers like Dr. Burns and William Lambard. Thus our monumental author of the sixteenth century has been built into the very foundation of English Institutional History. Since Blackstone there has been reared upon the basis of his work and that of his predecessors, a History of English Law by Reeves, the publication of whose treatise began the year American independence was acknowledge by Great Britain (1783). During the present century, the Institutional History of England has been greatly advanced by the writings of Palgrave, Kemble, Thorpe, Sir Henry Maine, Stubbs and Freeman, all of whom owe much of their inspiration to the historical science of Germany. From impulses proceeding from German scholars and from the new school of English historians, have sprung the recent American studies in historical jurisprudence, the essays in Anglo-Saxon Law by Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, Ernest Young and J. Laurence Laughlin, the Placita Anglo-Normannica, by Melville M. Bigelow, and the recent lectures by O. W. Holmes, Jr., on The Common Law.

(Plymouth) who appears to have removed to Rhode Island. This copy, through the courtesy of Mr. Winsor, was borrowed by the writer of this paper from the Library of Harvard College, and led to the discovery in Baltimore by Mr. Albert S. Cook of a third copy of the self-same edition (1596), which through the generosity of Mr. Cook is now in our possession.

Along this line of march, over old roads into new fields, American Institutional History will one day advance. It is the purpose of a little company of graduate students at the Johns Hopkins University to reconnoitre the ground.' They are now studying upon coöperative and, to some extent, upon representative principles, the local institutions of their respective states or sections of country. A few students represent Maryland; others Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. One man has entered the field of Ohio; others, that of Michigan and the Northwest, where English institutions were planted upon French soil. A student from Canada will investigate the AngloFrench institutions of his Province. The writer of this monograph is studying the origin of the town institutions of New England, and presents the following research upon Constables as a contribution to the main subject.

The importance of the Petty Constable as a connecting link between New England Towns and Old English Parishes has never yet been recognized. To trace the origin and development of the constabulary office and to show its exact process of transition from the old country to the new is the object of this paper. Besides Lambard and the old time authorities, we have utilized the resources of modern historical science, the Statutes of the Realm and of the English Colonies, together with certain hitherto unpublished manuscripts brought over to New England by Jonas Humphrey, who settled in the parish-town of Dorchester, Massachusetts. According to the traditions of his family, he was a constable in Wendover, County Bucks, in England. An official warrant and a list of constabulary duties, preserved by this faithful officer, are the best possible sources of information as to the character of the constable's office at the time of the Puritan migration.

We are indebted for copies of the above-mentioned documents to the eminent antiquary of Dorchester, who lately prepared for publication the Suffolk Deeds (Boston, 1880), Mr. William B. Trask, a descendant of Capt. William Trask, one of the old planters of Salem. While utilizing in the body of this monograph many facts derived from the Humphrey manuscripts, we shall append the same in full, as they are likely to prove an interesting contribution to the history of our local institutions. Mr. Trask's letter, giving a brief account of Jonas Humphrey and of the manuscripts themselves, will constitute the best preface to their separate perusal. These documents will clearly show that the duties of constable were not only more honorable, but also far better understood in Humphrey's day than in the time of Blackstone.

The latter, in his very inadequate account of constables, says:

1 Richard Frothingham, in his work on the Rise of the Republic of the United States, 26, says, "I have not met with a volume, or even an essay, on the growth of the municipal system in the United States."

V

66

"Considering what manner of men are for the most part put into these offices, it is perhaps very well that they are generally kept in ignorance" of the extent of their powers. This observation, which has been quoted over and over again, as though it were an infallible precept of the Common Law, and which even finds honorable mention in the last edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, in the article on Constables," may perhaps account in some measure for the general disrepute and comparative obscurity into which this ancient office, once dignified and well known, has now fallen. Time was when the best men of an English parish held in rotation the office of Parish Constable. No one was permitted to decline the responsibility of village headship, except women, who were allowed to furnish substitutes. In an old book entitled "English Liberties," published in London, 1719, it is said, "The Petty Constable is chosen by the people of the Parish.. The Petty Constables ought to be honest and able Men both in Body and Estate, and not of the meaner Sort; and therefore it hath been held that they ought not to be chosen by the House or Custom, if not fit to execute the Office. But 'tis now ruled, That a Custom for the Inhabitants to serve by Turns is good; so if it happen on a Woman she must provide one to serve the Office."2

In attempting to reconstruct the historical idea of the office of constable, we cannot rely with any degree of confidence on Blackstone, for the constabulary office had evidently begun to degenerate even in his day; and, as we have already implied, the learned judge himself, in his enumeration of constabulary duties, merely quoted from older writers like Lambard, who were better informed. Neither can we rely implicitly upon Lambard or Lord Coke, for both of these early authorities fail to explain even the origin of the constable's name. Coke in his Institutes, following Lambard, says, "Constable or cunstable is compounded of the Saxon words cuninge per contractionem kinge, and stable, id est columen, quasi columen regis, anciently written cuningstable."3 In other words, Lord Coke seriously maintains that the Constable, etymologically considered, is the support or mainstay of the King. Such an unwarrentable derivation of the name constable represents the fantastic, unscientific philology of the sixteenth century, inherited from the medieval monks, who explained the origin of words with even more originality than did Horne Tooke or Noah Webster.

As a matter of fact, the term constable was introduced into England through the Norman-French Connétable, old French Conestable or Cunestable. The word is derived from the Low Latin Con

1 Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (Judge Cooley's ed.), i. 355.

2 English Liberties or the Free-born Subject's Inheritance, containing Magna Charta, Charta de Foresta, &c. Lastly, of Justices of the Peace, Coronors, Constables, Churchwardens, Overseers of the Poor. Surveyors of the Highway, &c. Compiled first by Henry Care . . . In the Savoy, 1719. 3 Coke, Institutes, Part iv. cap. xvii.

stabulus (comes stabuli, or count of the stable). It is a word ! common to all the Romance languages, although in somewhat varying forms. It appears in the Provençal, in Italian, in Spanish, and in Portuguese. Both the Latin and the French forms were early imported into England. In Magna Carta we have Constabularius. In the Rolls of Parliament frequently occurs the form Conestable. The institution itself, as understood by the Normans and the peoples of Southern Europe, was akin to the Byzantine comes stabuli and the classic Master-of-Horse. Undoubtedly the office had its origin in menial service in connection with the royal stable. Primarily a constable was a hostler. The constabulary office belongs to a nexus of court institutions, like those of chamberlain, cupbearer and steward, which are of immemorial antiquity and common to both Aryan and Shemitic monarchies.

We shall discuss the whole subject of the institutions of the Royal Household in a special paper on the Origin of the Modern Ministerial System, but, in this connection, would merely remark that the name constable suggests a certain Byzantine influence surviving in the office itself, as the name of Cæsar survives in the Russian Czar,1 and the German Kaiser, or as the idea of the classic Imperator survives in modern emperors. Undoubtedly at a very early date Teutonic kings and dukes had their ministerial officers, their hostlers of high degree. The Franks had their Marschalk (from Mar, a horse, and Schalk, a knave or servant), an institution surviving in France to this day, in two forms, (1) Maréchal de France, (2) Maréchal ferrant, or shoer of horses. The Lombard kings and dukes had their Marpahis. The Saxons had their Horsethegn or Staller. Of necessity such offices would exist in the equine establishment of every Teutonic chieftain. It is highly probable that an old Germanic institution was baptized by a Latin name, Constabulus, just as a German military leader becomes a dux or duke. Classic titles, Byzantine trappings and court usages were introduced into the royal households of almost every Teutonic king or count; but while thus clothed upon with a Latin name and oriental dignity, mediæval constables owe their historic origin to menial service. In the South German town of Heidelberg there stands in a good state of preservation an ancient feudal stable, built of old red sand-stone, and known as the Marstall. It is now used as a riding-school for University students; but it is a good surviving type of the original horse-stalls whence the Marshals of Saxony and of France the Earl Marshals and Lord High Constables of England, rode forth to glory and honor.

1 The notion that the word Czar was a corruption of Cæsar, was formerly unquestioned, but Creasy, in his Platform of International Law, 126, and in his History of the Ottoman Turks, i. 341, says it is an Oriental, possibly a Tartar word, meaning sovereign ruler. He thinks the Russians acquired it through the Sclavonic translation of the Bible. But Mr. Edward A. Freeman, in his recent lectures before the students of the Johns Hopkins University, on the Historical Geography of South-Eastern Europe, came to the rescue of the old etymology, saying that he had been assured by a Slavonic friend of undoubted authority, that the old derivation is the correct one.

The office of the Lord High Constable (Constabularius totius Anglia) came into prominence as an hereditary office in the person of Miles of Gloucester in the reign of Stephen (1135-1154), although probably long before this constables had existed in every royal town and castle, in every carldom and upon every great manorial estate. Of course the office diminished in dignity the nearer it approached the common people. Among the subject Saxons existed a lowly office known by various names, as Tithingman, BorhsEaldor, Elder of the Pledge, Head-Borough, or Borough-Reeve, upon whom the shadow of the Norman name of constable was soon to fall, as the umbra nominis Romani had fallen upon many old Teutonic institutions. We cannot dwell at length in this connection upon the office of the Lord High Constable; suffice it to say, he was the representative of the King in all matters pertaining to armies and castles. He provided for all the King's horses and all the King's men. He mustered the royal forces and saw to it that every vassal sent his proper quota of armed men and horse. If an expedition was to be undertaken into foreign parts, the Lord High Constable provided means of transportation and served as kind of Inspector-General. He, in conjunction with the Earl Marshal, took cognizance of all offences committed during the foreign campaign, and decided all questions relating to the disposition of prisoners and booty. From the exercise of such functions arose Courts Martial and Martial Law.

According to Lambard and Blackstone the lower constabulary office was drawn from that of the Lord High Constable," as it were a very finger from that hand." Blackstone differentiates the lower office into the High Constable of the Hundred and the Petty Constable of the town or parish. On the authority of Spelman, he says Petty Constables were "first instituted about the reign of Edward III. We have looked through the statutes belonging to this reign and fail to find any sufficient ground for the above statement. It is at best rather a loose way of describing the origin of an institution to refer it to "about the reign" of a King who reigned for fifty years (1327-77). As to the origin of High Constables, Blackstone is more precise. He ascribes this institution to the Statute of Winchester, 13 Edward I. (1285), when it was enacted that "in every hundred and franchise two constables shall be chosen to make the view of armour." Although Blackstone and all the host who follow him are wrong on this point also, for the Constable of the Hundred is much older than the Statute of Winchester, yet in this connection it is interesting to observe that the latter office appears to be intimately related to the militia system of which the Lord High Constable. was the administrative head. By the Statute of Winchester, every man in England was to "have in his house harness for to keep the

1 Blackstone, 355. Compare Lambard. 2 Stubbs, Select Charters, 474.