Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/258

238 238 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. form and title, has continued without interruption down to our own day. We have here then the two capital elements of royal justice, — a tribunal of learned persons attached to the King's court (though not yet fixed to any certain place, but dependent on the King's movements), and judicial commissioners armed with the King's plenary authority, representing his dignity as inseparably associated with the dignity of the law, who render justice in his name in every part of the kingdom. We have even a beginning of the jurisdiction of the House of Lords — properly the King in ParHament — as a court of last resort. At the same time the King was enlarging his judicial powers by the institution of new remedies in civil affairs. One of the great problems of medieval justice was to prevent men from taking the law, or what they supposed to be law, into their own hands. It must have seemed in many parts of England at many times a less risky thing to settle a question of title or boundaries in one's own favor and by one's own strength than to invoke the tardy and cumbrous aid of the hundred or the county. Thus the prohibition the name of having kept good peace; and endeavors in this direction may be observed even before the Conquest. But a power that can effectually forbid men to redress themselves by the strong hand can no less effectually forbid the provocation, and furnish lawful aid for those who are disturbed in their peaceful en- joyment; and in order to justify its reforms it is bound to do so. The King must put forth his strength for right if private violence is to be without excuse. For such reasons Henry II. and his counsellors, not without long thought and watching,^ devised a speedy remedy for the protection and quieting of possession, to be administered by the King's judges over the heads of both popular courts and intermediate lords. Introduced as it was by an " assize " or special ordinance, perhaps made at the same council as the Assize of Clarendon in ii 66,^ this remedy for unjust dis- possession (and all dispossession save by regular judgment was counted unjust) ^ became known as the ** assize of novel disseisin." ^ " De beneficio principis succurritur ei (disseisito) per assisam novae disseisinae mul- tis vigiliis excogitatara et inventam." Bract. 164 b. The Grand Assize had already been described as " regale quoddam beneficium dementia principis de consilio procerum populis indultum " in the well-known passage of Glanvill, ii. 7, Sel. Ch. i6i. 2 P. & M. i. 124. ' Op. cit. ii. 51, In 1192 Abbot Samson's monks at St. Edmund's wanted him to turn out some townsmen who had encroached on abbey land in the town ; he told
 * of self-help is among the first cares of princes who mean to leave