Excerpt from The History of the Law Merchant and Negotiability, Vol. 3 Although the actual origin of the Law Merchant is enveloped in obscurity, this much may be said with certainty, it existed in its early stages as a body of varying customs obtaining among a certain class of the population - the class of merchants. As the number of the merchants increased, so the existence of these customs became more pronounced, with the result that they gradually became of sufficient importance to be generally recognised by the king's court, and finally to be included in the general law of the land. A notable peculiarity of the Law Merchant in its earlier stages was its international character combined with its administration as purely local custom, at the same time it partook of the nature of the widest and of almost the narrowest system of law. According to Blackstone, the English common law consisted of general customs, particular customs, and customs recognised by special jurisdictions - such as that of the Admiralty courts. In the earlier stages of our legal history particular customs, where they occurred, formed a kind of local common law, which was recognised, determined, and administered by purely local courts, but it is a historical fact that the king's courts gradually extended their own jurisdiction by encroaching upon that of the local courts, and conse quently the king's judges became well acquainted with many of the more important local customs, and afterwards were prepared to accord them full judicial recognition. One of the most striking illustrations of this is to be found in the final and complete judicial recognition of the custom of gavelkind. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.