advances, is a long step towards the consolidation of constitutional government.

In this way the Norman administration worked ; in many cases with great hardship to individuals, but rather depressing than crushing the old national organism. It is gradually developed. William the Conqueror was, so far as any king of the English could be, an irresponsible ruler; he was not a great organizer, but a powerful and laborious man. His hand was in everything, and his wisdom kept him from being a tyrant. William Rufus was a tyrant of the worst sort; but he was without the business powers of his father, and the work of government in the hands of Ranulf Flambard was full of irresponsible and wanton oppression. Henry I, as able a man as his father, and as despotic as his brother, by the employment of organized administration set a limit on his own caprice. Routine is the only safeguard of a people under a perfect autocracy, and by routine Henry I helped to bring on the reign of law. It is only in the struggles of the clergy that the idea of liberty finds any expression.

The attitude of the people to the crown during these reigns is constant: the whole national system is safe in their support of one another. The great vassals are the common enemies of both. Hence William Rufus and Henry I in their emergencies found it easy to purchase the effectual aid of the country by promises; and the people were sustained in their ancient customs by the king's fear of increasing the jurisdictions of the barons. The words in which Henry I in his Charter provides for the maintenance of the rights of the lower landowners are a significant proof of this; and of the way in which matters have to change before it is necessary for the barons to force the same provisions on John; in little more than a century the attitudes of the king and barons are reversed. In one important way, however, Henry I connected the local courts with the Curia Regis, by uniting several sheriffdoms under one of his justices. The justices were among the novi homines of the baronage, and, like all ministerial bodies, were jealously watched by both nobles and people.

The twenty years that follow the death of Henry I, and are called the reign of Stephen, are a period without example in our history. The feudal baronage take advantage of the struggle for the crown, to throw off every sort of restraint; and by dividing between the two parties in a way that prevents either from gaining a decided advantage, to destroy the new administrative machinery, and exercise irresponsible powers on their own estates. They now exemplify all the mischievous characteristics of continental feudalism: private wars; countless fortified castles; the cruel exercise of summary jurisdictions; the striking of private coinage. Each baron is a king in his own castle. That it is only for their own immunities that they fight, appears clearly from their desertions and tergiversations during the continuance of the war. To this disorganization and the irreconcileable opposition of the Empress, Stephen had nothing of his own to oppose. He was a brave man, but without resources, without administrative power, and devoid of political tact. By one act of policy, intemperate rather than unjustifiable, he broke with the clergy, to whom he owed his throne, and with the administrative corps, at the head of which Bishop Roger of Salisbury still was, without whose aid he had not a chance of maintaining it. His weakness had suffered the power of both to become overweening; his impolicy set both in array against him, and by one act he alienated every element in the state, and cut off his own safest sources of revenue. His attempt to create for himself a strong party and a rival nobility, by erecting new earldoms to be provided for out of the exchequer and by the demesne lands of the crown, provoking the jealousy of the barons and impoverishing the royal revenue, threw him for support on taxation which he had no means of enforcing. The natural result was war, and anarchy succeeding war, in which all central administration, except the ecclesiastical, collapsed, When all parties were exhausted, the bishops obtained the place of mediators, at which they had long aimed; and the succession of Henry II was the result of the compromise. Amongst the terms of the pacification which were intended to bind both Stephen and Henry, was a regular programme of administrative

reform; for the abolishing of the evils of the late anarchy, and the restoration of national prosperity. The castles were to be razed, the coinage reformed, the sheriffs to be replaced, the crown lands to be resumed, the new earldoms to be extinguished, foreigners to be banished, the administration of justice to be provided for, the Golden Age to return.

The reign of Henry II initiates the rule of law. The administrative machinery which had been regulated by routine under Henry I, is now made a part of the constitution, enunciated in laws, and perfected by a steady series of reforms. The mind of Henry II was that of a lawyer and man of business. He set to work from the very beginning of the reign to place order on a permanent basis, and recurring to the men and measures of his grandfather, to complete an organization which should make a return to feudalism impossible. To destroy the 'adulterine' castles, to abolish the 'fiscal' earldoms, to resume the alienated crown lands, was the first, the destructive part of his work; to restore the machinery of the Exchequer and Curia Regis, to extend their powers and to bring them into the closest contact with the provincial organization, was the next step. The greatest obstacles to the carrying out of this policy were the barons, and, unfortunately, the clergy also; the former must be compelled to agree to the restriction of their hereditary jurisdictions to the smallest compass, and the latter to allow themselves to be in all matters not purely spiritual subject to the ordinary process of the law. Hence arose the two great struggles of the reign in that with the barons Henry was successful; in that with the clergy, although worsted and humiliated, he carried off the fruits of victory. These matters ought not to be regarded separately; the Constitutions of Clarendon were but a part of a scheme which was to reduce all men to equality before the same system of law.

In his first years, Henry renewed the provincial visitations of the justices for both fiscal and judicial purposes; at a later period he largely increased the staff of judges for this very end, and at the same time greatly expanded the system of inquest by jury, which superseded the old processes of trial by battle and

compurgation, and led by no indistinct steps to the incorporation of the machinery of the shire and of the borough in the national council or parliament. The instructions given to the visiting judges are precise enough,-they are to enter the franchises of the barons, and to take cognizance of castle guard relic of old immunities.

and every

A second measure of reform less directly aimed at the feudatories, was no less effectual to the diminution of their strength. The commutation of military service for a money payment or scutage, placed the military training of the people and the disposal of their forces in the king's hands. It enabled him to hire mercenaries for his foreign wars, to dispense with the hated Danegeld, and to bring the ecclesiastical baronage under contribution. The revival of the ancient militia system or fyrd, by the assize of arms, enabled him to dispense with the military services of the barons for the maintenance of order at home. This ancient force had been called out under William Rufus and Stephen, it was now reorganized and ordered to furnish itself with modern weapons. Henry trusted the people more than the barons.

A third symptom of his decided policy was the bestowal of the office of sheriff on lawyers and soldiers rather than on the great barons, who had already succeeded, in some cases, in making it hereditary; during the whole of Henry's later years, these very important functionaries were drawn from the class which furnished the barons of the Exchequer and itinerant judges; and their powers were easily limited and regulated by the Curia Regis.

All these measures have a greater significance, viewed as parts of an extended scheme of administration; the reforms which they betoken run into every region of public business.

Henry II made the national council a different thing from what Henry I had left it; he summoned it at regular intervals, twice or thrice every year of his stay in England. Its composition was a perfect feudal court; archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons, knights, and freeholders. The business transacted in it was political, fiscal, legislative and judicial. In

every public matter the nation was, in theory, consulted; the laws were issued 'cum consensu et consilio;' even taxation, as we may infer from the dispute on Danegeld in the council of Woodstock, was suffered to come into debate; the king sat in person to hear the complaints of his people, and decided them by the advice of his bishops and judges. It was in a great council that he determined on the resumption of the alienated demesne; in another he arranged the great quarrel between Castille and Navarre; in another he issued the assize of Clarendon; in another he discussed the marriage of his daughter. That towards the end of the reign he found it necessary to limit the numbers of lower freeholders who attended the councils, is very probable; the use of summonses which prevailed from the first years of the reign gave him the power of doing this.

The Curia Regis and Exchequer continue to be united, but undergo a large modification by the increase and diminution of the number of judges. It is probable that Henry, as Edward I afterwards did, found the chances of corruption and oppression too tempting for the sort of men that he was educating, the lawyers and clerks of the court. He found it necessary in 1178 to restrict the number of those who exercised their functions in the Curia to five, and to reserve for his own hearing in council the causes in which this court, which until now had been a final court of appeal, failed to do justice. This limited tribunal is the lineal predecessor of the existing Courts of King's Bench and Common Pleas; the upper court of appeal, the king in his ordinary council, is the body from which at later dates the judicial functions of the Privy Council and the equitable jurisdiction of the Chancellor emerged. It is this council which, in conjunction with the elements of parliament, summoned to meet, but not under the proper parliamentary style, constitutes the Magnum Concilium of the next century; from the mixture of whose powers the House of Lords received its judicial character as a court of appeal, and the Privy Council derived its legislative character, which it attempted to carry out in the form of ordinances. The original tribunal, the king's ordinary council, retained throughout its undiminished powers,