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The article presents information on the gage of land in medieval England. The English gage of land with possession of the debtor until default is to all seeming developed later than the gage with immediate possession of the creditor; the origin of this later form of security for loans being directly connected with the history of the process of judicial execution. It will be seen that whether the medieval creditor take immediate possession or only on default of the debtor, the principle is the same. In either case the security is a usufructgage or it is a property-gage, or it is indeed a combination of the two. Though the tracing of the development down to the present lies beyond the scope of the present paper, it is believed that this very same conception lies at the basis of much of the modern English law.

This article explains the misunderstandings of the civil law. A rule of law that has been gradually developed can only be understood by knowing the course of its development; and that is more or less known by good lawyers, if the rule took its rise in England. So far as the American jurisprudence reaches back to an earlier date, there are the same reasons for tracing it to its source. Again, not only would it be hard to name any one who has thrown new light on such general problems of jurisprudence as the arrangement of the law, who has not known something of the labors of the civilians; but the paper tries to show that an ignorant misunderstanding of the Roman classification has led to confusion.