in the crown, were ever known to Anglo-Saxon England. Both king and people, indeed, seem steadily to have resisted every disposition to widen the royal jurisdiction. Instead of enlarging their own powers by encouraging suitors to seek justice directly from the crown, the king and the Witan frowned upon every symptom of popular discontent with the clumsy justice of popular tribunals, and forced suitors back upon the local courts. Instead of applying themselves to the study of practical remedies for the flagrant absurdities of their legal system, as Charlemagne had done, and as their Angevin successors were to do, the Anglo-Saxon kings adopted a series of measures which steadily tended to aggravate these absurdities, and to render them intolerable. It has been said, by some historians, that Alfred the Great showed a disposition towards the reform of legal procedure. Alfred had, indeed, the inestimable advantage of Charlemagne's example. So, also, had Edward, Æthelstan, and Edgar, his successors. But, whether it was that these monarchs, unlike Charlemagne, were constitutional kings, and were controlled in their policy by the Witan, or whether they failed to understand the necessity of reform, neither their legislation nor the records of legal administration during or after their time show any trace of a disposition to improve the law. Their whole energy was devoted to police, or at best to mere legal administration. The well-known passage in Asser's Life of Alfred is an example of the limited range of English legal ideas. Asser represents Alfred as inquiring into the correctness of his sheriffs' and ealdormen's legal decisions, and threatening them with removal for their ignorance of the law. But, as Mr. Kemble has pointed out, it is nowhere intimated that Alfred assumed the power to reverse those decisions, or that he attempted to create any judicial system more satisfactory than the one which, by common consent, even in his time, was utterly unequal to the public wants. One collection of laws after another, almost in a set formula, harshly forbade the people to bring their suits before the king, unless they had previously ex1 Kemble, Saxons in England, ii. 44, 45.

Even

hausted all the tedious formalities of the local courts. then, if the king consented to hear a complaint of denial of justice, his power of redress seems to have gone no further than to send the case back to the ealdorman or sheriff, with the threat of punishment if justice were still denied; or, what was probably more usual, to negotiate an extra-judicial compromise between the parties. Neither at the beginning nor at the end of the Anglo-Saxon time, was the king considered in law as the fountain of justice. The law was administered in the popular courts, theoretically as the act of the freemen. It was strict law; the decision, when reached, was final in the eye of the law; and not even the Witan itself wielded any process by which the letter of the common law could be escaped.

One result followed from this absence of equitable powers, which was, perhaps, not without an ultimate influence on the fate of the whole judicial system. A very slight examination of the law cases printed in the Appendix will show how rarely the parties were allowed to push their differences to a final judgment. A compromise was always effected where compromise was possible. Arbitration was, perhaps, the habitual mode of settling disputes among the Anglo-Saxons. This arbitration might take the actual forms of legal procedure, without offering any anomaly to the Anglo-Saxon mind. In regard to more than one of the cases given in the Appendix, it is evident that the judges are mere arbiters acting in judicial form. The king seems to have habitually performed this function of quasi judge. The curious case before Alfred, narrated in Appendix, No. 17, seems to be an instance. If a decision were given without the previous assent of both parties to the jurisdiction, it might be rejected, and a legal trial required, as in charters MCCLVIII., DCXCIII.,1 even though the king himself were judge. This loose habit of judicial administration, stimulated doubtless by popular distrust of the knowledge or honesty of the king's sheriffs, grew into a system, and not improbably was the germ of subsequent manorial jurisdictions. In a society which had no confidence either in 1 Appendix, No. 19 and No. 22.

its judges, its judicial processes, or its very law itself, — which could devise no system of reform in the practice, nor of equitable protection against the evils, of that law, - it was certainly not surprising that men should seek a remedy outside the public tribunals, even though the result should ultimately be more fatal to their own interests than all the immediate inconvenience or injustice they were suffering.

The three law courts thus described, with powers indistinctly defined and apparently overlapping each other, mark the whole period of Anglo-Saxon history. As they appear in the earliest times, so they appear in the latest, unchanged during six centuries, so far as their essential character is concerned, and unchanged in fact, except by the steadily increasing tendency towards aristocracy and feudalism. This tendency, though less marked and less mischievous than on the Continent, yet produced the only considerable changes that can be detected in the long history of the Anglo-Saxon judicial constitution. It only remains, therefore, to discuss the degree of influence which feudalism exerted on the judicial system of England down to the accession of William the Norman.

The origin of the English manor as a form of landed property belongs to the domain of real-property law, and will be treated hereafter in that connection. The origin of English manorial jurisdiction is a separate subject. The land and the jurisdiction do not necessarily go together. Originally, as has been seen, all jurisdiction belonged to the State. Only at a comparatively late period did the State allow its power to slip from its hands, and to become attached to the proprietorship of the land.

There is much contradiction, among the writers who have treated this subject, in regard to the stages of its development. Mr. Kemble sometimes inclines to believe that the manorial jürisdiction, as a jurisdiction in law, was of very early origin; 1 at other times, he asserts that "there is no clear proof that the immunity" of sacu and soen

exist before the time of Cnut."1 Professor Stubbs, without entering into any discussion of the subject, seems to favor the idea of an early origin.2 Dr. Konrad Maurer, whose thorough investigation of the point leaves his successors little more to do than to paraphrase his pages, leans also towards the theory that the manorial jurisdiction existed in law from a much earlier period than that to which it can be traced back in the laws, charters, and historical literature.3

Only with the utmost diffidence can any new inquirer venture to differ from authority so high as this. Yet there seems to be something forced in the assumption that an institution so revolutionary as a private common-law court could have existed unknown to the written law; and the ordinary rules of historical criticism hardly justify the historian in arriving at such a conclusion, unless under the pressure of absolute necessity. It is, therefore, a matter of some consequence to ascertain whether such a necessity exists. If not, it will certainly be safer to keep within the letter of the law.

Dr. Maurer has admirably explained and illustrated the nature of the early immunities granted to the great landed proprietors, and the private authority exercised by them over the occupants of their land, and the inmates of their household. As head of the household, the land-owner was bound to responsibility before the law for the good behavior of its inmates. He might dismiss from his service as infamous the man whom he could not hold to right, - a punishment which must have been almost equivalent to outlawry. As landlord, he might resume his grant of land, or he might simply eject the occupant on sufferance or at will. The state supported this power of the land-owner to the utmost, as one of its most necessary guaranties for the preservation of social order. On the other hand, the tenant or peasant cultivator would be inclined to accept, or even to invite, the decision of his lord, rather than incur the risks of a public suit without his lord's support, or the possibility of drawing upon himself the extremity of his lord's disfavor. It was therefore natural that the lord should have developed, for his own use, a certain system of law, in mediating between his own people in their disagreements with each other, or with the public. It was natural, too, that this system should be based upon the ordinary hundred law, - the only code known to England. Yet all this did not create a jurisdiction in the eye of the law. The great proprietor might discourage his dependants from suing in the hundred court; he might assume upon himself the responsibility for the acts of his dependants, and place himself between them and the law, paying their fines, and using his wealth and power to force all parties rather to accept his arbitration than appeal to legal process. But all this did not remove his people from the jurisdiction of the hundred court. It did not create a new jurisdiction in law. It merely established an association analogous to the family, which chose to settle its legal questions without bringing them before the courts.1

In the tendency to establish such a private court of arbitration, the great landed proprietors appear to have been actively supported by the crown. It is, indeed, not improbable that the large proprietors could essentially lighten the task of the law courts, and facilitate the objects of royal policy, by looking sharply to the behavior of their dependants. It is not improbable, too, that the lord of the manor did, on the whole, offer more effective means for obtaining justice and preserving order than could be possibly offered by the hundred, with its clumsy organization and procedure. If to these natural reasons for favoring the landlords there be added the great pressure of the church and of the warriors to obtain favors from the crown, it is not a matter of surprise that the crown should have yielded to a tendency the ultimate effect of which it probably could not foresee.

The royal grants, so far as they affected the ordinary course of justice, seem to have been double in their nature. They were, in the first place, grants of the fines and pecuniary profits of jurisdiction, which, by the old system, fell to