Instead of conforming to abstract principles of public law and hereditary succession, they strove to enlarge their territories at the expense of their rivals, and to leave them at their death to their sons rather than to their brothers, nephews and more distant relations.
The word apanage is still employed in this sense in French official texts of some Customs; but it was in old public law that it received its definite meaning and importance.
For the next few months he travelled to regain his health; and in the spring of 1836 returned to his cotton plantation, where for several years he devoted his time largely to reading political philosophy, political economy, public law and the English classics, and by careful management of his estate he acquired considerable wealth.
The third division would consist of the collections of the so-called Pseudo-leges Canuti, the laws of Edward the Confessor, of Henry I., and the great compilation of the Quadripartitus, then of a number of short notices and extracts like the fragments on the "wedding of a wife," on oaths, on ordeals, on the king's peace, on rural customs (Rectitudines singularum personarum), the treatises on the reeve (gerefa) and on the judge (dema), formulae of oaths, notions as to wergeld, &c. A fourth group might be made of the charters, n as they are based on Old English private and public law and supply us with most important materials in regard to it.
Questions of public law and administration are discussed in 217 clauses, while 197 concern the Church in one way or another, apart from purely ecclesiastical collections.
