Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/151

 ^. GREEN: HENRY II 137 erty, of inheritance, of wardship, of forfeiture of crown lands, of advowsons to churches, and of the tenure of land. For the first time the name of Justitiarii Itinerantes was given in the Pipe Roll to these travelling justices ; and the anxiety of the king to make the procedure of his courts perfectly regular, instead of depending on oral tradition, was shown by the la w-book s which his ministers began at this time to draw up. As a security against rebellion, a new oath of fealty was required from every man, whether earl or villein ; fugitives and outlaws were to be more sharply sought after, and felons punished with harsher cruelty. " Thinking more of the king than of his sheep," the legate admitted Henry's right to bring the clergy before secular courts for crimes against forest law, and in various questions of lay fiefs ; and agreed that murderers of clerks, who till then had been dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts, should bear the same punishment as murderers of laymen, and should be disinherited. Religious churchmen looked on with helpless irritation at Henry's first formal victory over the principles of Thomas ; in the view of his own day he had " renewed the Assize of Clarendon, and ordered to be observed the execrable decrees for which the blessed martyr Thomas had borne exile for seven years, and been crowned with the crown of martyrdom." During the next two years Henry was in perpetual move- ment through the land from Devon to Lincoln, and between March 1176 and August 1177 he summoned eighteen great councils, besides many others of less consequence. From 1178 to 1180 he paid his last long visit to England, and again with the old laborious zeal he began his round of journeys through the country. " The king inquired about the justices whom he had appointed, how they treated the men of the kingdom ; and when he learned that the land and the subjects were too much burthened with the great number of justices, because there were eighteen, he elected five — two clerks and three laymen — all of his own household ; and he ordered that they should bear all appeals of the kingdom and should do justice, and that they should not depart from the King's Court, but should remain there to hear appeals, so that if any question