Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/184

 176 BARONY AND THANAGE April what wo may call market justice and the right to have their own men in their own friborh, or frankpledge, a civil and police juris- diction identical with that of the hundred-court, with power to use the ordeal both of water and of hot iron, together with the right to execute as well themanslayer as the hand-having and back- bearing thief caught on their land and to take his goods ; in short, that in England the king's thane, and the baron after him, had as such just those rights of justice by virtue of which the ordeal could be held and penalty of death or mutilation could be inflicted, which, as we have seen, constituted barony in Normandy. In other words, in England as in Normandy barony was an office to which were attached the rights that constituted * la haute justice '. Exception may be taken to these inferences as being drawn from sources of doubtful authority, the Anglo-Norman law-books being the work of unknown persons. But no such objection can be urged against inferences drawn from Glanvill's and Bracton's treatises. These surveys of the Laws and Customs of England are at once wider and narrower in scope than the earlier law-books. They have much more to say of procedure and of law ; but they have much less to say of jurisdiction. When the ' Leges Henrici ', for instance, was written, the administration of justice was still a local matter that concerned mainly the seigneurial and com- munal courts, the king's interest in it being almost confined to the profits arising out of it. It was then a matter of prime concern to the officials of the king's court to ascertain just what pleas belonged to the king alone and what he shared with others. By the end of the twelfth century, however, on the pretext that any wrongful use of force, however slight, was a breach of the king's peace over which he alone had jurisdiction, all serious crimes had been converted into pleas of the Crown, and exclusive jurisdiction over ' seisin ', the possession as distinct from the ownership of land, had been secured for the king's justices ; the king's right to hear complaints of defect of justice in the local courts and to punish contempt of his precepts had been used to evoke into his court by means of writs of right cases over which it could not otherwise claim jurisdiction ; by the systematic use of the eyre the shire-courts had been converted into royal courts in which the judges were no longer the suitors but the justices of the king's own court ; and the right to hold pleas of the Crown even in the castellaries, which were outside the sheriff's jurisdiction, had been won for the visiting justices, resistance being made impossible by the appointment of the king's justices as sheriffs of the counties visited by them.^ The barons in 1215 did their sheriffs of Yorkshire and Westmorland, and of Cumberland respectively (Madox, Hist, oj the. Exch. i. 123 ff. ; List of Sheriffs). n
 * Glanvill and de Vaux, the itinerant justices north of the Trent from 1176, were