h century, it had been taken for granted that a legal system has an ongoing character, a capacity for growth over generations and centuries. This was a uniquely Western belief: that a body of law, a system of law, contains, and should contain, a built-in mechanism for organic change and that it survives, and should survive, by development, by growth. Thus the new profession of jurists, coming out of the universities that were founded from the late eleventh century on, developed the newly systematized canon law of the Roman Catholic Church progressively, each generation building on the work of its predecessors; likewise, although to a somewhat lesser extent, the various new systems of royal law, feudal law, urban law, manorial law, and mercantile law were also seen as evolving systems (Berman 9).
Prior to the seventeenth century, they remained adherents primarily of natural law theory or of positivism or of an uneasy mixture of the two. There did emerge in the sixteenth century, most prominently in France, an historicist school of legal thought that held up the ancient Frankish customary law as a model to be opposed to "foreign" Romanist and canonist legal traditions. This nationa
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