the Roman way; that is, to make the law themselves, from the king. For
that was another consequence of the Roman law, that not only was it an
order by the sovereign power, but that this sovereign power was not in
theory a legislature, as it is with us to-day, but the sovereign; in
France and the Continental countries laws were made in theory and in
practice by the king. So the Normans came over with the Roman notion,
in the first place, as to what law was, that it was a written, newly
made order of a sovereign, not a thing that had grown up and was part
of the lives and customs of the people, but a thing made out of hand
by the king; and, secondly, that it was made by the king and not by
any legislature. And the first two or three centuries of English
parliamentary history were mainly taken up, in the English Parliament,
so far as it concerns the subject of our course here, in the contest
between Parliament and the king as to who should make law and what
law was. It took more than one century for the Parliament, after the
Norman Conquest, to revive as a Parliament at all; then when it
did finally get together it took two or three centuries before it
established the principle that it had anything to do with the making
of law. The Norman kings regarded the Parliament as a mere method of
getting money from the people, hardly even as a Council when they
sought for popular support; and yet it was through the fact that they
so regarded Parliament that Parliament was enabled ultimately to
acquire the law-making or the legislative power which exists in all
our legislatures to-day. The king, in those days, derived his revenue
mainly from his own land. It was not necessary for the government to
have any revenue except for what we should call the king's private
purse. What was wanted for public expense was for two or three
well-recognized purposes, all purposes of defence. The old English
taxation system was in a sense no system. There wasn't any such thing
as taxation. There was the "threefold necessity" as it was called. It