Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/251

231 KINGS JUSTICE IN EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 23 1 fealty, are wanting. Feudalism carried its point so far that bishops did homage to the Crown for the temporal possessions of their sees after election and before consecration ; and they do so to this day.^ Here is at once a wide field of jurisdiction for the King, so much widened as to be practically new. A boundary dispute arises between a great monastery and the Norman earl who is the abbot's next neighbor ; or to take real cases, the abbot of Battle, the King's own foundation, claims to be exempt from all juris- diction and interference of the Bishop of Chichester; the monks of Gloucester claim in the name of God and St. Peter to have their rights in lands out of which they are kept by the Archbishop of York; the men of Wallingford, being jealous (as great powers may nowadays be in affairs of trade on a larger scale), disturb the privileged fair held by the monks of Abingdon ; the abbot of Peterborough makes difficulties about letting the abbot of St. Edmund's have stone for repairs.^ Who shall decide? The hun- dred court is not fitted to deal with such matters ; a county court, or a great court of three or more counties, would be dignified enough, and in a matter of ancient customs the King may still have such a court summoned to enlighten him ; but the proper and the best judge, whose judgment will really be conclusive and can- not be slighted with impunity, is the King himself, the common lord of the parties. Besides which, the King can tell best what he intended to grant, for we are not to think yet of the jealous caution of the latter days in which the judicial right hand may not know what the executive left hand doeth. And this eminence of knowl- edge will, as the course of time requires, be extended to the grants ■ of the King's pious ancestors. Thus we find the King, before his court can be called an organized tribunal, already dispensing a justice which, if not of common right, is not merely of favor. He is not yet bound by forms ; he may hold a meeting of his counsellors, or he may order the proper county court to investigate complaints of encroachment by his own officers on the immunities of a religious house.^ On 1 Anselm's homage to William Rufus, in 1093, is mentioned as a thing already settled by precedent : " More et example praedecessoris sui inductus pro usa terrae homo regis factus est." Eadmer, page 41 of Rolls ed. The words " I become your man " were omitted in the form used later ; it is not certain that Anselm used them. 2 Bigelow, Plac. Anglo-Normannica, 14, 29, 32. 8 lb., 30-31.