Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/149

 HENRY II 135 itself, with the development of national experience and national self-dependence, had no place in Henry's days, and had indeed no reason for existence. The strife for the aboli-j tion of privileges which in the nineteenth century was waged) by the people was in the twelfth century waged by the Crown. In that time, if in no other, the assertion of the supreme authority of the king meant the assertion of the supreme authority of a common law ; and there was, in fact, no country in Europe where the whole body of the baronage and of the clergy was so early and so completely brought into bondage to the law of the land. Since all courts were royal courts, since all law was royal law, since no justice was known but his, and its conduct lay wholly in the hands of his trained servants, there was no reason for the king to look with jealousy on the authority exercised by the law over any of his officers or servants. It may possibly be due to this fact that in England alone, of all countries in the world, the police, the civil servants, the soldiers, are tried in the same courts and by the same code as any private citizen ; and that in England and lands settled by English peoples alone the Common law still remains the ultimate and only appeal for every subject of the realm. But the power which was taken from certain privileged*^ classes and put in the hands of the king was in effect by Henry's Assize given back to the people at large. Foreigner as he was, Henry preserved to Englishmen an inheritance which had been handed down from an immemorial past, and which had elsewhere vanished away or was slipping fast into forgetfulness. According to the Roman system, which in the next century spread over Europe, all law and government proceeded directly from the king, and the subject had no right save that of implicit obedience; the system of repre- sentation and the idea of the jury had no place in it. Teutonic tradition, on the other hand, looked upon the nation as a commonwealth, and placed the ultimate authority in the will of the whole people ; the law was the people's law — it was to be declared and carried out in the people's courts. At a very critical moment, when everything was shifting, uncer- tain, transitional, Henry's legislation established this tradi-