Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/126

 112 //. FROM THE 1100' S TO THE 1800' S years. The deposition of Stephen, the elections of Matilda and of Henry, had been so many formal declarations that the king ruled by virtue of a bargain made between him and his people, and that if he broke his contract he justly forfeited his authority. The routine of silent and submis- sive councils had been broken through, and the earliest signs of discussion and deliberation had discovered themselves ; while the Church, exerting in its assemblies an authority which the late king had helplessly laid down, formed a new and effective centre of organized resistance to tyranny in the future. Even the rising towns had seized the moment when the central administration was paralysed to extend their own privileges, and to acquire large powers of self- government which were to prove the fruitful sources of liberty for the whole people. . . . It was these new conditions of the national life which con- stituted the real problem of government — a problem far more slow and difficult to work out than the mere suppres- sion of a turbulent baronage. In the rapid movement towards material prosperity, the energies of the people were in all directions breaking away from the channels and limits in which they had been so long confined. Rules which had V been sufficient for the guidance of a simple society began to break down under the new fulness and complexity of the national life, and the simple decisions by which questions of property and public order had been solved in earlier times were no longer possible. Moreover, a new confusion and uncertainty had been brought into the law in the last hun- dred years by the effort to fuse together Norman and Eng- lish custom. Norman landlord or Norman sheriff naturally knew little of English law or custom, and his tendency was always to enforce the feudal rules which he practised on his Norman estates. In course of time it came about that all questions of land-tenure and of the relations of classes were regulated by a kind of double system. The Englishman as well as the Norman became the " man " of his lord as in Norman law, and was bound by the duties which this in- volved. On the other hand, the Norman as well as the Eng- lishman held his land subject to the customary burdens and