Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/206

198 were actually so called. There were other castellaries in England, along the Welsh march, on the south coast, and in the midlands, and none of them differed essentially from Coupland; not one of them could the sheriff enter for any purpose, and even in the nineteenth century the king's writs were addressed to the lord and his bailiff, not to the sheriff of the county in which they were supposed to lie. Now, in Anjou the royal vassals over whom the counts had won control were distinguished as greater and lesser, the former being those who had castles; may not the distinction drawn in England in 1215 between greater and lesser barons likewise have been one between barons who had castellaries and barons who had not, that is, between barons with whom the king must communicate directly and barons with whom as with his other tenants he might communicate through the sheriff?

During the fourteenth century the barony courts were rapidly reduced both in number and in importance, partly by strict observance of the doctrines that no one could have a free court, or a court baron, unless he had free tenants who could judge of felony, and that a franchise not used ceased to exist; partly by the refusal of the judges to allow the barons' courts to determine cases of more than 40s. value, or to deal with offences against a statute law unless the statute itself gave them power to do so; and partly by the institution of the justice of the peace, who could do all their police work so much more efficiently than they could, hampered as they were by an archaic procedure and an antiquated customary law. Only the courts of the greater baronies and those in the remoter parts of the country survived to be renamed Courts Leet when the lawyers began to distinguish