Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/168

 154 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S English local government, in which local officials, though preserving a good deal of healthy independence, are brought into direct contact with the central administration. The genuineness of Edward's interest in the Statute is shewn by the frequent appointment, in the succeeding years, of " Con- servators of the Peace," charged with enforcing the duties prescribed by the enactment; and this step seems to have been the direct forerunner of the great institution of the Justices of the Peace, which has a continuous history from the end of the fourteenth century.^ Obedience to the Statute I was ultimately enforced by the simple, but very effective! expedient, of holding the local unit responsible as a whole for I the neglect of any of its inhabitants. But the wondrous activity of the year 1285 did not end with the Statutes of Westminster and Winchester. In the same year, Edward defined, by the so-called Statute of Qpc- cumspectf A^nti. !^ which is, in truth, nothing more than an official regulation, addressed to his judges respecting their behaviour in the diocese of Norwich, but which was accepted as a general declaration of royal policy, his attitude on the delicate question of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The King had already taken up a decided position on the equally delicate subject of the acquisition of lands by the Church, when, in 1279, b y the first Statute of M nrtmnin, he had announced his intention of rigidly enforcing the policy of the Great Charter. No person, cleric or lay, was, without royal license, to vest lands by way of perpetual succession in a monastery or other body not subject to the ordinary chances of death, upon pain of forfeiture of the land in question. This policy, com- menced in the natural dislike of the feudal nobles to a practice which deprived them of the incidental windfalls of wardships, marriages, fines on admission of new tenants, and the like, was warmly seconded by the King, who saw the grave public danger of allowing land which represented a liability to military service to get into the hands of clerics who claimed exemption from such duties, and whose tenacious grip would ' The " Conservators " were, like the later " Justices," local land- owners of a certain estate. (See the case of Lawrence Basset, Pari, Writs, I, p. 389.)