local courts had no written records. Their decisions were embodied only in an oral tradition, necessarily more or less unreliable. But a writ was the beginning of a record; it put into preservable shape a brief statement of the ground on which the plaintiff sought redress in the King's Court. If the clerks of the chancery issued it, and the judges of the King's Court recognized it as entitling the plaintiff to relief at their hands, one definite point was fixed in the law: such and such facts entitled one to relief in the King's Court. A writ once thus approved would be good in subsequent cases of similar sort. Thus by this simple means the law received one of its earliest and greatest impulsions toward uniformity and certainty. The clerks of chancery began to compile a register of the writs which had been adjudged to state good causes of action, and upon this Register of Writs was reared in later reigns the fabric of a scientific law.

44. The itinerant justices and the court at Westminster. The King's Court administered a better justice than the local tribunals, but the local tribunals met regularly and near at hand. Henry's reforms were incomplete unless the King's Court were not merely open but accessible to all England. Here again Henry adapted to judicial uses an institution already in existence. From time to time the kings themselves had journeyed over the country and administered justice to those who sought their court wherever it might happen to be. Moreover, royal commissioners had been many times sent from place to place to hold inquests for fiscal and kindred

purposes. Henry experimented with a view to establishing throughout the land a regular course of visits by royal officers, representing the court and free from local prejudice or interest, to hear the pleas of the crown as well as to look after the collection from various sources of the royal revenue. From 1176 on, these commissioners, now called justices, so largely did the judicial function occupy them, were sent on regular circuits through England; and Henry's instructions in 1166 and 1176 to them and the sheriffs, who had the duty of seeing their judgments executed, may be said to constitute the initial charter of a law for all England-a real common law, professionally administered throughout the whole land and hence achieving a uniformity hitherto largely impossible.

The king's central court at his capital of Westminster, composed of his household officers, was of course the Curia Regis par excellence, but the courts held by the itinerant justices were also royal courts, administering the same rules of law. This uniformity was secured by sending the members of the central court (Curia Regis capitalis) themselves from time to time on circuit. Gradually the judicial functions of the central court became so important that we read that in 1178 the king has chosen five men, two clerks and three laymen, to hear all complaints of the kingdom; and questions they cannot decide are to be reserved for the king and his wise men. In this specialization for the administration of justice, both among the judges in eyre and in the central tribunal, we get the first distinct separation of

the judicial from the administrative functions of the royal establishment.

In fine, Henry's tireless energy and administrative genius had before his death familiarized England with a common law covering both the most important form of land tenure and the most serious breaches of the public order. Moreover, this law is administered in a way so much more efficient than the law of the local communal or baronial courts that it is likely to draw all litigation into its courts. These courts, too, have been brought to the people by an elaborate system of visits by professional judges familiar with a uniform and certain law-one for all England.

45. Magna Charta.-The work of Henry stood the test of the absentee rule of Richard I (1189-1199), and even of the malignant tyranny of John (1199-1216). The successful revolt which extorted the Great Charter (Magna Charta) in 1215 from John was largely a revolt of the barons, and in a measure it restored to them the judicial privileges which they had been losing under the skillful encroachments of Henry II. But on the whole the charter is more noteworthy for restoring to the people the protection of property which Henry's assizes had secured to them. Its greatest contributions were to Constitutional Law. It established by the very fact of its promulgation, as well as by the obvious implications of its language, the cardinal doctrine of English law, around which in after centuries the struggle for the liberties of the people against tyranny centered: that the king himself was

subject to the law. In the famous thirty-ninth and fortieth articles we read:

"39. No freeman shall be arrested or detained in prison or deprived of his freehold, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way molested; and we will not set forth against him nor send against him, unless by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land.

"40. To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice."

In the next reign Bracton, the second great English legal author, though himself a royal appointee as judge, could write, in language afterwards notably echoed by Coke, that the king was under God and the law.

46. The professionalizing of the administration of justice. The reign of Henry III (1216-1272), despite the occupation of its statesmen with the long and doubtful struggle between the king and his personal followers on the one hand and the barons on the other, was a period during which the English law developed not only steadily but even rapidly. The political turmoil affected only the matters of constitutional law. The royal party still thought of the king's relation to the provisions of the Great Charter as that of the signatory to a treaty, bound only by his express consent, but the nation, headed by the barons, by persistently extorting re-issues of the Charter from the reluctant sovereign, gradually hardened into law the conception of the supremacy of the English constitution.

The steady progress of the common law was due

to the fact that the course its development was taking removed it from the arena of political strife. The administration of law was becoming a distinct profession; its judges were no longer mainly composed of the great men among the king's advisers, whose first interest was in statecraft. In the earlier years of Henry's long reign they were in the main clerics, who combined with a knowledge of the growing structure of English law, gained from serving as clerks in the royal courts or chancery, a knowledge also of the canon law administered in the ecclesiastical tribunals. Some elements of the Roman law, though on the whole surprisingly few, found their way into English common law in this way. As time went on, however, the professional judges were more and more frequently laymen whose knowledge of law had been gained in pleading the cause of clients at the bar of the royal courts, and who because of their professional eminence had been selected to argue cases on behalf of the crown, and finally had been elevated to the bench. In both its branches, the bench and the bar, the administration of justice was becoming a lay profession with a specialized learning, consisting in the main of the rules of adjective and substantive law followed by the King's Court.

47. Development of trial by jury.-The procedure of the King's Court had, by its very merits, imposed itself even upon the lower courts, and gradually the jury was developing out of the inquest. In 1216 the Church had disapproved the ordeal as superstitious, and a substitute was found for it in