Page:Man Who Laughs (Estes and Lauriat 1869) v2.djvu/116

96 of indictment to the twenty-four members of the grand jury. If they approved, they wrote above, billa vera; if the contrary, they wrote ignoramus. In the latter case the accusation was annulled, and the sheriff had the privilege of tearing up the bill. If during the deliberation a juror died, this legally acquitted the prisoner and made him innocent, and the sheriff, who had the privilege of arresting the accused, had also that of setting him at liberty.

That which made the sheriff universally feared and respected was the fact that he had charge of executing all the orders of her Majesty,—a fearful latitude. An arbitrary power lodges in such commissions. The officers termed vergers, the coroners making part of the sheriff's cortége, and the clerks of the market as escort, with gentlemen on horseback and their servants in livery, made a handsome suite. The sheriff, says Chamberlayne, is the "life of justice, of law, and of the county."

In England an insensible demolition constantly pulverizes and disintegrates laws and customs. You must understand in our day that neither the sheriff, the wapentake, nor the justice of the quorum could exercise their functions as they did then. There was in the England of the past a certain confusion of powers, whose ill-defined attributes resulted in their overstepping their real bounds at times,—a thing which would be impossible at the present day. The usurpation of power by police and justices has ceased. We believe that even the word "wapentake" has changed its meaning. It implied a magisterial function; now it signifies a territorial division: it specified the centurion; it now specifies the cantred (centum).

Moreover, in those days the sheriff of the county combined in his authority, which was at once royal and municipal, that of the two magistrates formerly known