GLANVIL, Glanvill, or Glanville, Ranulph de (died 1190), the oldest writer on English jurisprudence and chief justiciary of England in the reign of Henry II., was born at Stratford in Suffolk, but in what year is unknown. There is also almost no information regarding his early life. Butterley Abbey was founded by him in 1171. In 1174, along with other barons of Yorkshire, he raised a body of knights to oppose William the Lion, king of Scotland, who had invaded the north of England, and it was he who took the king prisoner at Alnwick. In 1175 he was appointed sheriff of Yorkshire, in 1176 justice of the king’s court and a justice itinerant in the northern circuit, and in 1180 chief justiciary of all England. It was under his direction that Henry II. completed his judicial reforms, but the principal of them had been carried out before he came into office. After the death of Henry in 1189 Glanvil was removed from his office by Richard I., and imprisoned till he had paid a ransom, according to one authority, of .£15,000. Shortly after obtaining his freedom he joined the order of the cross, and he died at the siege of Acre in 1190. At the instance, it is supposed, of Henry II., Glanvil wrote or superintended the writing of the Tractatus le legibus et consuetudinibus reyni Anglia?, which is divided into 14 books, and is chiefly a practical treatise on the forms of procedure in the curia regis or king’s court, the principles of law involved in these forms being only incidentally referred to. As the source of our knowledge regarding the earliest form of the curia regis, and for the information it affords regarding ancient customs and laws, it is of great value to the student of English history. It is now generally agreed that the work of Glanvil is of earlier date than the ...

GLANVILL, or Glanvil, Joseph (1636-1680), was born at Plymouth in 1636, and was educated at Oxford university, where he graduated as M.A. in 1658. In 1666 he obtained the cure of Abbey Church at Bath; in 1678 he became prebendary of the church of Worcester, and acted as chaplain in ordinary to Charles II. He died at Bath, November 16, 1680, in the forty-fourth year of his age. Glanvill’s first work, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, or Confidence in Opinions, manifested in a Discourse of the shortness and uncertainty of our Knowledge, and its Causes, ιvith Reflexions on Peripateticism, and an Apology for Philosophy, 1661, is interesting as showing one special direction in which the new method of the Cartesian philosophy might be developed. Pascal had already shown how philosophical scepticism might be employed as a bulwark for faith, and Glanvill follows in the same track. The philosophic endeavour to cognize the whole system of things by referring all events to their causes appears to him to be from the outset doomed to failure. For if we inquire into this causal relation we find that though we know isolated facts, we cannot perceive any such connexion between them as that the one should give rise to the other. In the words of Hume, “they seem conjoined but never connected.” All causes then are but secondary, are merely the occasions on which the one first cause operates. It is singular enough that Glanvill who had not only shown, but even exaggerated, the infirmity of human reason, himself paid a strange tribute to its weakness; for, after having combated scientific dogmatism, he not only yielded to vulgar superstitions, but actually endeavoured to accredit them both in his Scepsis Scientifica, 1665, and in his Philosophical Considerations concerning the [existence of ...