高考英语 可能考的名著《Ancient Law》07素材.docVIP

PAGE PAGE 30 用心 爱心 专心 《Ancient Law》 Ancient Law by Henry Maine Chapter 7 Ancient and Modern Ideas Respecting Wills and Successions Although there is much in the modern European Law of Wills which is intimately connected with the oldest rules of Testamentary disposition practised among men, there are nevertheless some important differences between ancient and modern ideas on the subject of Wills and Successions. Some of the points of difference I shall endeavour to illustrate in this chapter. At a period, removed several centuries from the era of the Twelve Tables, we find a variety of rules engrafted on the Roman Civil Law with the view of limiting the disinherison of children; we have the jurisdiction of the Praetor very actively exerted in the same interest; and we are also presented with a new remedy very anomalous in character and of uncertain origin, called the Querela Inofficiosi Testamenti, the Plaint of an Unduteous Will, directed to the reinstatement of the issue in inheritances from which they had been unjustifiably excluded by a fathers Testament. Comparing this condition of the law with the text of the Twelve Tables which concedes in terms the utmost liberty of Testation, several writers have been tempted to interweave a good deal of dramatic incident into their history of the Law Testamentary. They tell us of the boundless license of disinherison in which the heads of families instantly began to indulge, of the scandal and injury to public morals which the new practices engendered, and of the applause of all good men which hailed the courage of the Praetor in arresting the progress of paternal depravity. This story, which is not without some foundation for the principal fact it relates, is often so told as to disclose very serious misconceptions of the principles of legal history. The Law of the Twelve Tables is to be explained by the character of the age in which it was enacted. It does not license a tendency which a later era thought itse