Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/249

229 KING'S JUSTICE IN EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 229 before, because it had never been made. And if the contem- porary use in England of such terms as " mandata imperialia " shows that William would equally have repudiated any claim of superiority on the Emperor's part, we may also read " basileus," which imports the same claim of perfect sovereignty, in Anglo- Saxon charters. The tradition was broken only once in the whole course of English history, and then by John, the worst of all Eng- lish kings.^ Yet it was inevitable that the King's activity and authority should increase. William's ancestor RoUo had come to a country living under a Prankish law which, rude as it might be, was more advanced than the customs of the Northmen ; and the Normans took up the speech and the laws of their new country. William and his Normans, on the other hand, came into England, a land of less advanced law, bringing a law of the same general type, but farther advanced and more defined. Whether William supposed himself to be only exercising the same rights that English kings had exercised, or assumed that as King in England he could at least have no less powers than he had as Duke in Normandy, or, as perhaps is most likely, had no theory of his powers at all, the practical result could only be to raise the English official system and EngUsh procedure to the Norman standard. Here then was the beginning of a new system of jurisdiction. It grew and prevailed in a manner thoroughly typical of English reforms, not by any exclusive establishment, but by superior merit. The King had to do justice for some particular purposes. His justice was much stronger than any other; if costly, it was well worth the cost; and its extension was as welcome to suitors as un- welcome to those who made their profit of small folk's weakness or timidity. Not that the King's justice was offered to the people at large in the first instance; it was eagerly sought after as a privi- lege. Even when it became general, there was no word of abolish- ing the old popular courts and their procedure. They were merely superseded by the greater convenience of the royal courts, or of private lords' courts which imitated the royal methods as closely as they could ; at last, and very gradually, they perished by disuse, leaving but a few traces to be swept away by systematic modern legislation. It was a century after the Conquest when the King's law was recognized in terms as the law of the lan4. and yet a 1 Stephen went near it. Freeman, N. C. V. 247.