Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/146

 132 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S knights and freeholders were called to aid in carrying out the law. The " jurors " must be ready at the judges' summons wherever and whenever they were wanted. They must be prepared to answer fully for their district ; they must expect to be called on all sorts of excuses to Westminster itself, and no hardships of the journey from the farthest corner of the land might keep them back. The " knights of the shire " were summoned as " recognitors " to give their testimony in all questions of property, public privilege, rights of trade, local liberties, exemption from taxes; if the king demanded an " aid " for the marriage of his daughter or the coming of age of his son, they assessed the amount to be paid ; if he wanted to count an estate among the Royal Forests, it was they who decided whether the land was his by ancient right. They were employed too in all kinds of business for the Court ; they might be sent to examine a criminal who had fled to the refuge of a church, or to see whether a sick man had appointed an attorney, or whether a litigant who pleaded illness was really in bed without his breeches. If in any case the verdict of the Shire Court was disputed, they were summoned to Westminster to repeat the record of the county. No people probably ever went through so severe a discipline or received so efficient a training in the practical work of carrying out the law, as was given to the English people in the hundred years that lay between the Assize of Clarendon in 1166 and the Parliament summoned by De Montfort in 1265, where knights from every shire elected in the county court were called to sit with the bishops and great barons in the common Parliament of the realm. In the pitiless routine of their work, however, the barons of the Exchequer were at this early time scarcely regarded as judges administering justice so much as tax-gatherers for a needy treasury. Baron and churchman and burgher alike saw every question turn to a demand of money to swell the royal Hoard; jurors were fined for any trifling flaw in legal procedure ; widows were fined for leave to marry, guardians for leave to receive their wards ; If a peasant were kicked by his horse, if In fishing he fell from the side of his boat, or If in carrying home his eels or herrings he stumbled and was