Page:The Public Records and The Constitution.djvu/19

 Conqueror, the greater part of the jurisdiction appears to have fallen to the Justices in Eyre.

This brings us to the first extant records of judicial proceedings. Except possibly one or two fragments of earlier date, they belong to the reign of Richard I, and there are fortunately a few of them which are rolls of the Court of the Justices in Eyre. They show clearly enough what was done while the circuit lasted, and what was the course pursued with regard to certain matters when it came to an end.

Of about the same dates as these first Eyre Rolls we have others in some respects like them, in some respects the very different, which belong to the Principalis Curia Regis, carefully distinguished by Glanvill from the Court of the Itinerant Justices. These are the rolls not of a court commissioned to travel from county to county, and to hear the pleas of the county in the county itself, but of a court temporarily fixed in a particular place, and there hearing pleas relating to all counties. The existence of this court marks another step towards that centralization which followed the Norman Conquest towards the perfection of that policy which, while making use of the county organization, transferred most of the power of the old County Courts to the King's superior Courts of Law.

This particular court was not that great Court or Council of the King, in its entirety, which I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture. It was not even the whole of the Principals Curia Regis, of which there were, as early as Glanvill's time, two divisions the Court coram Domino Rege, and the Court coram ejus Justiciis. It was the Court coram ejus Justiciis. It was a Court in which the King did not sit in his own person, but to which he had delegated certain functions. The mode of delegation grew almost certainly out of the system of the Eyres; and some of the earlier rolls which are left