Under such circumstances the barons of the Exchequer were requested to obtain legal assistance from the judges of the other courts. This tribunal was resorted to by ordinary suitors for obvious reasons. It was doubtless regarded as a kind of tribunal of arbitration: it was trusted in its special disputes; it was without the drawbacks of the local courts, and those who composed it were quite willing to enlarge their special jurisdiction. In spite of the fact that attempts were carefully made to prevent this trenching on the province of the other tribunals, the general jurisdiction of the Court of Exchequer by means of some legal fictions became an accomplished fact. In the age of Bracton this Court existed, but under difficulties, though it had reached a definite form as a special and a general tribunal. But the Exchequer was not in theory the king's court; it was not the court in which justice was dispensed by the sovereign, or, in his absence, by his own selected judges. That court had by the time of Edward I. grown into two distinct tribunals, with two distinct court rolls-the Common Bench, "the appropriate tribunal for ordinary civil suits between subject and subject," and the King's Bench, which was, strictly speaking, "the court of our lord the king held before the king himself."

There is always a danger in formulating very definite descriptions of institutions which have a gradual growth, and in some respects it would be misleading to speak of the King's Bench at the end of the thirteenth century as if it were a simple municipal tribunal for the decision of ordinary disputes, for at any moment the king might be present, and its resemblance to a modern law court would

then be lost in the return of the archaic and picturesque personal jurisdiction of the sovereign. This royal presence was, however, fast disappearing: it had appeared in a fluctuating manner for years, so that at times the Bench had been non-existent; while the Common Bench, as during the minority of Henry III., had been the king's court. Nor has the distinction between the king's court as we understand it and the king sitting with his council. become altogether clear. "There remain in suspense many questions as to the composition and jurisdiction of this the highest of all tribunals. . . . The fourteenth century has to answer these questions; the thirteenth leaves them open." It is enough, however, that at this particular period we are able to see in defined form the courts of law which for several centuries were to exist in the same shape and to exercise the same powers. Again, we are able to see with reasonable distinctness the despatch of justice in the king's name in the country districts. But though the itinerant judges, whether for the purpose of the trial of criminals or for the decision of civil disputes, were partly justices from the king's court, the exclusive duty had by no means yet devolved on them. Early in Henry III.'s reign "this work was often entrusted to four knights of the shire; at a later time one of the permanent justices would usually be named, and allowed to associate some knights with himself." In nothing is the ubiquity of the law more noticeable than in these species of jurisdiction. In the second year of Edward I.'s reign "two thousand commissions of assize were issued in other words, the king's courts had jurisdiction in the remotest corner of the realm. But, again, we must not carry into our survey of this medieval jurisdiction our

ideas of the assize of the twentieth century. The eyre, or iter, was much more than what we should now term a court of assize. Let us give the picture as it is presented to us in the History of English Law:

"If we suppose an eyre in Cambridgeshire announced, this has the effect of stopping all Cambridgeshire business in the bench. Litigants who have been told to appear before the justices at Westminster will now have to appear before the justices in eyre at Cambridge. There is no business before the bench at Westminster if an eyre has been proclaimed in all the counties. Then, again, the justices are provided with a long list of interrogatories (capitula itineris) which they are to address to local juries. Every hundred, every vill in the county must be represented before them. These interrogatories their number increases as time goes on-ransack the memories of the jurors and the local records for all that has happened in the shire since the last eyre took place some seven years ago; every crime, every invasion of royal rights, every neglect of police duties must be presented. The justices. must sit in the county town from week to week and even from month to month before they will have got through the tedious task and inflicted the due tale of fines and amercements. Three or four of the permanent judges. will be placed in the commission; with them will be associated some of the magnates of the district; bishops and even abbots, to the scandal of strict Churchmen, have to serve as justices in eyre. Probably it was thought expedient that some of the great freeholders of the county. should be commissioned, in order that no man might say

that his judges were not his peers. An eyre was a sore burden; the men of Cornwall fled before the face of the justices; we hear assertions of a binding custom that an eyre shall not take place more than once in seven years" (ƒ).

The view which we thus obtain is one of a widespreading justice, of courts of law as yet unfettered by technical rules. For what in more recent times has been known as "equity" as distinguished from “law”—in other words, a justice more rational because less technical -had not yet come into being, for the very simple reason that it was not yet required. The Chancery was, therefore, not a judicial tribunal at all. The need of a

separate court of equity is not yet felt, for the King's Court, which is not yet hampered by many statutes or by accurately formulated case law, can do equity.” The non-existence of this "equitable" jurisdiction indicates not only the absence of complex disputes for decision and of harassing legal technicalities, but also shows us that the functions of judges were more in the nature of those now exercised by men whom we should term arbitrators. We have reached, in fact, a period of some definiteness of jurisdictions combined with much indefiniteness of technical law and procedure. A greater complexity of civilisation was followed by a remarkable increase in the technicality of English law, and the age of Bracton was in some respects an Arcadian period, when a universal justice was dispensed without costs and without the encumbrance of legal formalities.

(f) History of English Law, Vol. I. p. 180.

Equally noticeable and important is the change which has now become apparent in the character of the judges of the king's courts: ecclesiastics are giving place to laymen, and among laymen a body of professional lawyers is becoming evident who are either advisers of or advocates for suitors. The change was gradual; the king's judges were not drawn exclusively from the laity for many years, and of Edward I.'s judges not a few were clerks. But even before the end of Henry III.'s reign "the lay element is beginning to outweigh the ecclesiastical," and we have, therefore, passed out of that archaic period of society in which the priest is the judge. This is, of course, a social phenomenon of considerable importance; it marks a distinct epoch, for the more elementary a society the stronger is the religious influence in the sphere of law. The causes of this are diverse; with them, however, we are not concerned here. What has to be noted is the appearance of professional judges and of a professional class of lawyers, of precedents which begin to be of validity, of technical forms having later a frequently unreasonable importance, and of judicial decisions based on a general body of recognised and substantive law rather than on an uncertain mixture of moral and religious rules, customs, and common sense. Of these three features the work of Bracton, which has been well described in a single phrase as being Romanesque in form, English in substance," is illustrative. The influence of the canon law and of Roman law is obvious not only in its breadth of view, but in some classical pedantries, occasionally also in some actual rules which supply the absence of authority arising either from English dicta, practice, or custom. But "the main matter of his treatise is genuine English law, laboriously col