Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/148

 134 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S and there was still an appeal to the king's justice. But against the new system there was no appeal; it was orderly, methodical, unrelenting ; it was backed by the whole force of the kingdom ; it overlooked nothing ; it forgot nothing ; it was comparatively incorruptible. The lesser courts, with their old clumsy procedure, were at a hopeless disadvantage before the professional judges, who could use all the new legal methods. If a man suffered under these there was none to plead his cause, for in all the country there was not a single trained lawyer save those in the king's service. How- ever we who look back from the safe distance of seven hundred years may see with clearer vision the great work which was done by Henry's Assize, in its own day it was far from being a welcome institution to our unhappy forefathers. There was scarcely a class in the country which did not find itself aggrieved as the king waged war with the claims of " privilege " to stand above right and justice and truth. But all resistance of turbulent and discontented factions was vain. The great justiciars at the head of the legal adminis- tration, De Lucy and Glanville, steadily carried out the new v code, and a bo^ of lawyers was trained under them which formed a class wholly unknown elsewhere in Europe. Instead of arbitrary and conflicting decisions, varying in every hundred and every franchise according to the fashion of the district, the judges of the Exchequer or Curia Regis declared judgments which were governed by certain general prin- ciples. The traditions of the great administrators of Henry's Court were handed down through the troubled reigns of his sons ; and the whole of the later Common law is prac- tically based on the decisions of two judges whose work was finished within fifty years of Henry's death, and whose labours formed the materials from which in 1260 Br acton drew up the greatest work ever written on English law. There was, in fact, in all Christendom no such system of government or of justice as that which Henry's reforms built up. The king became the fountain of law in a way till then unknown. The later jealousy of the royal power which grew up with the advance of industrial activity, with the growth of public opinion and of its means of expressing