Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/255

235 KINGS JUSTICE IN EARLY MIDDLE AGES. 235 heart and strength, we may well believe, to set themselves in the future against all attempts to introduce foreign methods of justice. English law had to develop itself with native resources, and was driven to be inventive. It might borrow on occasion, — some leading men were prepared to borrow more than posterity approved of, — but it was not to be displaced. The King's justice, with all its innovations in form, was really the strongest guardian of the national law; for the central power of the King's court moulded the law to uniformity. What might have become a number of feeble provincial customs became the one and indisputable law of the land. The foundation laid by Henry I. was submerged in the horrible anarchy of Stephen's time but not removed. Henry H. was able to take up the work where his grandfather had left it, perhaps all the more efficiently by reason of the crying need for a king who could and would govern. Whatever faults Henry II. may be chargeable with, incompe- tence or indolence in the duties of his office cannot be reckoned among them. He was not only an active ruler and a master of administration, but a statesman, a scholar, and a lawyer; and he had the gift, by no means always found in conjunction with per- sonal ability, of attracting the best men to his service. The mould- ing of royal justice into settled forms which took place during the reign was due, to a large extent, to Henry's own invention. He had a free hand for experiment and improvement ; forms were still elastic, and the formal division of labor in high offices was not yet fixed, so that creation of new functions and redistribution of old ones met with no great difficulty. So far indeed was the official system from being complete, that, if we may judge by the gaps in our extant materials, it was not uncommon for the King to make rules, or even what we should now call enactments, of first-rate im- portance, of which it was nobody's business — or, what amounts to the same thing, not known to be any certain person's business — to keep a permanent record. But, on the whole, we find the benefits of methodical procedure in the hands of skilled officers increasing and appreciated ; they are more than once or twice extolled by contemporary writers. The King's court or council — so far we may call it either — was in the Anglo-Norman period essentially what it had been before the Conquest; namely, the King himself, and as many of the great men, bishops, and abbots as happened to be on the spot. Henry II. did not altogether abandon the custom of doing 31