Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/314

Rh 298 ENGLAND LUISTORY. Origin of the jury. Recogni tions. Central ization of justice. Falkland becomes terra regis. Growth of manors. was invented or introduced, that, even more than other institutions, it emphatically grew. Its germ may be seen in all those cases, compurgatiou or any other, where a matter is decided by the oaths of men taken from the community at large. The Conquest caused a step in advance by the more constant employment of recognitions taken on oath. Under Henry II. the practice was still further strengthened ; but it was not till long after his day that the modern idea of the jury was established, as no longer witnesses but judges of facts. When their judicial character was fully established, that is, when in the reign of Charles II. they ceased to be called to account for their verdicts, the old popular character of the courts in a great measure came back to them. In this way justice became more centralized in England than anywhere elsa. All the weightier causes came to be tried either in the king s own courts or by judges immedi ately commissioned by him. The local chiefs gave way to th.3 king s representatives. One local officer indeed grew into increased activity. This was the officer who in each shire had always been specially the king s officer, the shire-reeve or slieriff, who looked after the interests of the king, while the ealdorman or earl represented the separate being of the shire. Under William, earls ceased to be appointed, save where they had distinct military duties. Under his successors earldoms gradually sank into merely honorary dignities. Bat the sheriff was in the Norman reigns the busiest of all officers ; for he had to collect and bring in all that was due to the royal exchequer from the endless sources of income by which it was fed. The main political result of the Norman Conquest thus was to strengthen every tendency that was already in being and such tendencies have been powerfully at work ever since the beginning of the growth of the thegnhood by which the king, his authority, hi.s officers, took the place of ths nation and its authority. But the older system was undermined rather than overthrown, and the course of our history has, to a great extent, given vis back the old institutions under other shapes. Thus, for instance, there was a strong tendency at work to turn the folldand, the land of the nation, into the land of the king. To this process the Conquest gave the finishing touch. The stroke by which the whole ^ay soil of England was held to be forfeited to the Conqueror turned ofolkland into terra regis. From Domesday onward ie folklmid vanishes ; but now that the crown lands are placed under the control of parliament, as part of the national revenue, the terra, regis has practically become folkland again. And while the king, the highest lord, was thus encroaching on the nation, that is, on the community which took in all others, smaller lords were doing the like to the lesser communities which made up the nation. Under the older system all grants of sae and sor, that is, all grants to a particular person of any special jurisdiction exempt from the ordinary local courts, were in their own nature exceptional. As the new ideas grew, the manor, as it was called by the Normans, finally supplanted the township. Lawyers gradually found out that the exceptional novelty was the original state of things. Just as they ruled the king to be the fountain of justice, because he had gradually taken the administration of justice into his own hands, so they ruled that, wherever any rights of the community had escaped the grasp of the lurd, their existence must necessarily be owing to an unrecorded grant of the lord. The ancient court of the people, the court baron, was held to be the court of the lord. Here again the evil has cured itself. The lord and his court have become harmless ; but they remain as curious examples of the way in which lawyers have read the history of England backwards. Both as regarded the greater lord and the lesser, the tendency of the ideas which the Norman Conquest strongly New k confirmed was to put the notion of property before the of. kl &quot;6 notion of office Kingship, the highest office in the common- p^ en wealth, came to be looked on mainly as a possession. The rather king of the people has now put on the character of the lord than of the land ; his title gradually changes into a form which o(Iice - better expresses this new position. The King of the English gradually changes into the King of England. William him self is still almost always Rex Anglorum. But the new territorial title now begins to creep into use, and from the be ginning of the thirteenth century it altogether displaces the older style. But the new ideas did much more than merely change the royal style. As soon as office had changed into property, as soon as the chief of the people had changed into the lord of the land, the old rule that the king should be chosen out of the one kingly house began to stiifen into the doctrine of strict hereditary right. The general results of the Conquest were all in favour of that doctrine; but the circumstances of the reigns which immediately followed the Conquest all told the other way, and helped to keep up the elective character of the crown for some time longer. The ancient doctrine died out very slowly, but it did die out in the end. And then lawyers found out that the crown had been hereditary from the beginning, and ruled that the king never died, and that the throne never could be vacant. On the other hand, as office was turned into property, so Priino- property in land was turned into office, and carried with it g ellitu: much of the likeness of a miniature sovereignty. The djctrina of primogeniture also now naturally supplanted the old principle of division of lands. No doctrine could be more opposite to the old doctrine of nobility than the doctrine which gave everything to a single son in the family. In this way primogeniture has its good side. It gave u.s a peerage ; but, in giving us a peerage, it saved us from a noblesse. The immediate ecclesiastical effects of the Nora. an Con- Ecclesl quest, those which in truth formed part of the process of a f ^ conquest, have been already spoken of. But the introduc- t ^ e Q O tion of foreign prelates, and the closer relations with Rome, quest, worked in many ways. The foreign bishop naturally stood at a greater distance from the native clergy than his English predecessor had done. Moreover, the new theories as to the tenure 5f land turned the bishop into a baron, holding as a tenant-in-chief of the crown. The bishop Chang* became in his own diocese more of a lord and less of a t| ie P 01 father, while he was often kept away from his diocese by ^ holding high temporal office. It gives a false view of the case to say that the prelates grasped at high temporal olh ce : the case rather is that, in a time when education was chiefly confined to the clergy, public business was mainly in the hands of the king s clerks, and that they received bishoprics as the reward of their temporal services. Under such bishops the Church was secularized and feudalized. Ecclesiastical livings were looked on less as offices with an endowment for the maintenance of the holder than as benefices charged with certain duties which might be discharged by deputy. The relation of the parish priest to his bishop put on the likeness of the relation between a man and his lord. At the same time, the rage for founding monasteries, which was at its height in Normandy at the time of the Conquest, Exemp came into England with the Normans, and ii^ the next tl | s _ l century drew a fresh impulse from the foundation of the ter j esa , Cistercian order. The love of exemptions of all kinds led chapter to a constant striving on the part of ecclesiastical bodies to be exempted from the ordinary ecclesiastical jurisdiction. This is shown, not only by separate monasteries, but even by the cathedral chapters, especially where the place of the chapter was filled by a monastic body. And one immediate result of the Conquest was the transfer of the seats of several bishoprics from smaller towns to greater. This was