Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/140

 126 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S royal system the legal men of hundreds and townships, the knights and freeholders, were ordered to search out the criminals of their district, and " present " them for trial at the Shire Court, — something after the fashion of the " grand jury " of to-day, save that in early times the jurors had themselves to bear witness, to declare what they knew of the prisoner's character, to say if stolen goods had been divided in a certain barn, to testify to a coat by a patch on the shoulder. By a slow series of changes which wholly reversed their duties, the " legal men " of the juries of " pre- sentment " and of " recognition " were gradually trans- formed into the "jury" of to-day; and even now curious traces survive in our courts of the work done by the ancestors of the modern jury. In criminal cases in Scotland the oath still administered by the clerk to jurymen carries us back to an ancient time : " You fifteen swear by Almighty God, and as you shall answer to God at the great day of judgment, you will truth say and no truth conceal, in so far as you are to pass on this assize." The provincial administration was set in working order. New sheriffs took up again the admin- istration of the shires, and judges from the King's Court travelled, as they had done in the time of Henry I., through the land. . . . Henry, however, was at once met by a difficulty unknown to earlier days. The system which the Conqueror had estab- lished of separate courts for secular and ecclesiastical busi- ness had utterly broken down for purposes of justice. Until the reign of Stephen much of the business of the bishops was done in the courts of the hundred and the shire. The Church courts also had at first been guided by the customary law and traditions of the early English Church, which had grown up along with the secular laws and had a distinctly national character. So long, indeed, as the canon law remained somewhat vague, and the Church courts incomplete, they could work peaceably side by side with the lay courts ; but with the development of ecclesiastical law in the middle of the twelfth century, it was inevitable that difficulties should spring up. The boundaries of civil and ecclesiastical law were wholly uncertain, the scientific study of law had hardly