Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/128

 ij 114 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S to be brought under the jurisdiction of the newly-estab- lished Church courts. This system of conflicting laws was an endless source of perplexity. The country was moreover divided into two nationalities, who imperfectly understood one another's customary rights ; and it was further broken into various classes which stood in different relations to the law. Those who had sufficient property were not only deemed entirely trustworthy themselves, but were also considered answerable for the men under them ; a second class of free- holders held property sufficient to serve as security for their good behaviour, but not sufficient to make them pledges for others ; there was a third and lower class without property, for whose good conduct the law required the pledge of some superior. In a state of things so complicated, so uncertain and so shifting, it is hard to luiderstand how justice can ever have been secured ; nor, indeed, could any general order have been preserved, save for the fact that these early courts of law, having all sprung out of the same conditions of primitive life, and being all more or less influenced and so brought to some common likeness by the Roman law, did not differ very materially in their view of the relations be- tween the subjects of the State, and fundamentally admin- istered the same justice. Until this time too there had been but little legal business to bring before the courts. There was practically no commerce ; there was little sale of land ; questions of property were defined within very narrow limits ; a mass of contracts, bills of exchange, and all the compli- cated transactions which trade brings with it, were only beginning to be known. As soon, however, as industry de- veloped, and the needs of a growing society made themselves felt, the imperfections of the old order became intolerable. The rude methods and savage punishments of the law grew more and more burdensome as the number of trials increased ; and the popular courts were found to be fast breaking down under the weight of their own ignorance and inefficiency. The most important of these was the Shire Court. It still retained its old constitution; it preserved some tradi- tion of a tribunal where the king was not the sole fountain of justice, and the memory of a law which was not the