Reminiscences of Charles Butler Author:Charles Butler Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. JURISPRUDENCE. THE Inns of Court completely divorced the Reminiscent from the muses:—in the course of his professional studies he endeavoured to obtai... more »n a general elementary knowledge of the Laws and Constitutions of other countries. The few following miscellaneous observations on some of the topics, to which this subject leads, will not, perhaps, be unacceptable to his readers. III. 1. Heir ship and Venality of Judicial Offices in France. An Englishman will hear with surprise, that in France, from the age of Lewis the twelfth, till the revolution, most offices of justice were both hereditary and saleable ; he will hear, with greater surprise, that the wisdom of this national provision was a point on which respectable opinions were divided at the first, and continued divided to the last. In the year 1467, offices, which before that time had been simple commissions, revocable at the king's pleasure, were, by an edict of Lewis the eleventh, rendered perpetual and hereditary. This edict gave rise both to the heirship and sale of offices. In 1493, Charles the eighth published an edict, which, while it prohibited the sale by one subject to another, of offices that regarded the administration of justice, was silent on the sale of other offices, and was therefore supposed to legalize their sale. An edict of Lewis the twelfth allowed the sale even of offices of justice. Until 1522, the whole of the money paid for the purchase of them was received by the crown ; but in that year, an edict of Francis the first permittedindividuals, possessed of such offices, to sell them, on paying a certain proportion of the purchase-money into the royal treasury; this made venality of offices an important article of the French constitution, and an important branch of the royal revenu...« less