judicial application but also by the fact that royal policy with respect to the 
American dominions was executed along the lines laid down in the case. 
It has been for its prospective effects that Calvin's Case has been regarded, 
if at all, by political historians. It has stood for them a mere abutment, not as 
a bridge between two of their eras. The remarkable array of matter culled from 
records and reports to support the court's determinations has remained for 
them an inert mass of precedents—the documents no doubt made suspect for 
sitting cheek by jowl in the pages of the report with legendary heroes and with 
a legal fiction for which the status belli with the Devil himself was vouched 
out of the Holy Writ. That these documents, though servants in the case, 
nevertheless possess an independent and respectable past and, if considered in 
relation to others like them, may furnish a bulk of probative matter directly 
material to an understanding of the medieval system foisted upon the colonists 
is something that has been overlooked by investigators into Stuart imperial 
policy. The scholarship of Sir Edward Coke, for all its faults and conceits, 
does not deserve such disesteem. For what our tentative reconstruction 
of the law and practices of the medieval empire is worth, we are glad to confess 
that we took counsel of his testimonies; they led us into the problem and 
carried us no small distance. To the clairvoyant words, paraphrased from 
Chaucer, that Coke wrote into the report "out of the old fields must come the 
new corn" we gratefully add the proper concluding couplet: 
"And out of olde bokes, in good feith, 
Cometh al this newe science that men lere."