Henry the Second 9

Henry the Second 9

But at whatever inconvenience to his courtiers Henry carried out his

own purposes, and kept pace with the enormous mass of business that came

to him. In all his hurried journeys we see busy royal clerks scribbling

away at each halt charters, grants, letters patent and letters close, the

king too fighting, riding, dictating, signing, sometimes dating his

letters from three places on the same day. A travelling king such as this

was well known to all his people. He was no constitutional fiction, but a

living man; his character, his look and presence, his oaths and jests,

his wrath, all were noted and talked over; the chroniclers who followed

his court with their gossip and their graver news spread the knowledge of

his doings. A new sense of law and justice grew up under a sovereign who

himself journeyed through the length and breadth of the land, subduing

the unruly, hearing pleas, revising unjust sentences, drawing up charters

with his own hand, setting the machinery of government to work from end

to end of England. More than this, the king himself had learned to know

his people. He had seen for himself the castles of the barons, the huts

of the peasants, the little villages in the clearings; he had seen the

sheriff sitting in the shire court, the lord of the manor doing justice

in his "hall-moot," the bishop and archdeacon dispensing the law in the

church courts. By his sudden journeys, his unexpected movements and rapid

change of plans, he arrived at the very moment and the very place where

no one looked for him; nothing was safe from his eye and ear; no false

sheriff or rebellious lord could be sure when his terrible master might

be at his doors. Foreigner as the king was, there was soon no Englishman

who knew the affairs of his kingdom so well. His penetrating curiosity,

his wide experience, his practised judgment, rapidly made him one of the

most sagacious administrators and wisest legislators that ever guided

England in a very critical moment of her history; and when he finally

drew up his system of reform there was not a single point of principle in

it from which he or his successors found it necessary afterwards to draw

back.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER IV

 

 

THE FIRST REFORMS

 

Henry began his work of reorganization by taking up the work which his

grandfather had begun--that of replacing the mere arbitrary power of the

sovereign by a uniform system of administration, and bringing into order

the various conflicting authorities which had been handed down from

ancient times, royal courts and manor courts, church courts, shire

courts, hundred courts, forest courts, and local courts in special

franchises, with all their inextricable confusion of law and custom and

procedure. Under Henry I. two courts, the _Exchequer_ and the _Curia

Regis_, had control of all the financial and judicial business of the

kingdom. The Exchequer filled a far more important place in the national

life than the Curia Regis, for the power of the king was simply measured

by the state of the treasury, when wars began to be fought by mercenaries,

and justice to be administered by paid officials. The court had to keep a

careful watch over the provincial accounts, over the moneys received from

the king's domains, and the fines from the local courts. It had to

regulate changes in the mode of payment as the use of money gradually

replaced the custom of payments in kind. It had to watch alterations in

the ownership and cultivation of land, to modify the settlement of

Doomsday Book so as to meet new conditions, and to make new distribution

of taxes. There was no class of questions concerning property in the most

remote way which might not be brought before its judges for decision.

Twice a year the officers of the royal household, the Chancellor,

Treasurer, two Chamberlains, Constable, and Marshal, with a few barons

chosen from their knowledge of the law, sat with the Justiciar at their

head, as "Barons of the Exchequer" in the palace at Westminster, round

the table covered with its "chequered" cloth from which they took their

name. In one chamber, the Exchequer of Account, the "Barons" received the

reports of the sheriffs from every county, and fixed the sums to be

levied. In a second chamber, the Exchequer of Receipt, the sheriff or

tax-farmer paid in his dues and took his receipts. The accounts were

carefully entered on the treasurer's roll, which was called from its

shape the Great Roll of the Pipe, and which may still be seen in our

Record Office; the chancellor kept a duplicate of this, known as the Roll

of the Chancery; and an officer of the king registered in a third Roll

matters of any special importance. Before the death of Henry I. the vast

amount and the complexity of business in the Exchequer Court made it

impossible that it should any longer be carried on wholly in London. The

"Barons" began to travel as itinerant judges through the country; as the

king's special officers they held courts in the provinces, where difficult

local questions were tried and decided on the spot. So important did the

work of finance become that the study of the Exchequer is in effect the

key to English history at this time. It was not from any philosophic love

of good government, but because the license of outrage would have

interrupted there turns of the revenue that Henry I. claimed the title of

the "Lion of justice." It was in great measure from a wish to sweep the

fees of the Church courts into the royal Hoard that the second Henry began

the strife with Becket in the Constitutions of Clarendon, and the increase

of revenue was the efficient cause of the great reforms of justice which

form the glory of his reign. It was the fount of English law and English

freedom.

 

The Curia Regis was composed of the same great officers of the household

as those who sat in the Exchequer, and of a few men chosen by the king

for their legal learning; but in this court they were not known as

"Barons" but as "Justices," and their head was the Chief Justice. The

Curia Regis dealt with legal business, with all causes in which the

king's interest was concerned, with appeals from the local courts, and

from vassals who were too strong to submit to their arbitration, with

pleas from wealthy barons who had bought the privilege of laying their

suit before the king, besides all the perplexed questions which lay far

beyond the powers of the customary courts, and in which the equitable

judgment of the king himself was required. In theory its powers were

great, but in practice little business was actually brought to it in the

time of Henry I; the distance of the court from country places, and the

expense of carrying a suit to it, would alone have proved an effectual

hindrance to its usefulness, even if the rules by which it was guided had

been much more complete and satisfactory than they actually were.

 

The routine of this system of administration, as well as the mass of

business to be done, effectually interfered with arbitrary action on the

king's part, and the regular and methodical work of the organized courts

gave to the people a fair measure of protection against the tyranny or

caprice of the sovereign. But the royal power which was given over to

justices and barons did not pass out of the hands of the king. He was

still in theory the fount of all authority and law, and could, whenever

he chose, resume the powers that he had granted. His control was never

relaxed; and in later days we find that while judges on circuit who gave

unjust judgment were summoned before the Curia Regis at Westminster, the

judges of the Curia Regis itself were called for trial before the king

himself in his council.

 

The reorganization of these courts was fast completed under Henry's great

justiciar, De Lucy, and the chancellor Thomas. The next few years show an

amount of work done in every department of government which is simply

astonishing. The clerks of the Exchequer took up the accounts and began

once more regular entries in the Pipe Roll; plans of taxation were

devised to fill the empty hoard, and to check the misery and tyranny

under which the tax payers groaned. The king ordered a new coinage which

should establish a uniform system of money over the whole land. As late

as the reign of Henry I. the dues were paid in kind, and the sheriffs

took their receipts for honey, fowls, eggs, corn, wax, wool, beer, oxen,

dogs, or hawks. When, by Henry's orders, all payments were first made in

coin to the Exchequer, the immediate convenience was great, but the state

of the coinage made the change tell heavily against the crown. It was

impossible to adulterate dues in kind; it was easy to debase the coin

when they were paid in money, and that money received by weight, whether

it were coin from the royal mints, or the local coinages that had

continued from the time of the early English kingdoms, or debased money

from the private mints of the barons. Roger of Salisbury, in fact, when

placed at the head of the Exchequer, found a great difference between the

weight and the actual value of the coin received. He fell back on a

simple expedient; in many places there had been a provision as old at

least as Doomsday, which enacted that the money weighed out for town-geld

should if needful be tested by re-melting. The treasurer extended this to

the whole system of the Exchequer. He ordered that all money brought to

the Exchequer should itself be tested, and the difference between its

weight and real value paid by the sheriff who brought it. The burden thus

fell on the country, for the sheriff would of course protect himself as

far as he could by exacting the same tests on all sums paid to him. If

the pound was worth but ten shillings in the market, no doubt the sheriff

only took it for ten shillings in his court. Practically each tax, each

due, must have been at least doubled, and the sheriff himself was at the

mercy of the Exchequer moneyers. There was but one way to remedy the

evil, by securing the purity of the coin, and twice during his reign

Henry made this his special care.

 

In the absence of records we can only dimly trace the work of legal reform

which was carried out by Henry's legal officers; but it is plain that

before 1164 certain great changes had already been fully established. A

new and elaborate system of rules seems gradually to have been drawn up

for the guidance of the justices who sat in the Curia Regis; and a new set

of legal remedies in course of time made the chances of justice in this

court greater than in any other court of the realm. The _Great Assize_, an

edict whose date is uncertain, but which was probably issued during the

first years of his reign, developed and set in full working order the

imperfect system of "recognition" established by the Norman kings.

Henceforth the man, whose right to his freehold was disputed, need but

apply to the Curia Regis to issue an order that all proceedings in the

local courts should be stopped until the "recognition" of twelve chosen

men had decided who was the rightful owner according to the common

knowledge of the district, and the barbarous foreign custom of settling

the matter by combat was done away with. Under the new system the Curia

Regis eventually became the recognized court of appeal for the whole

kingdom. So great a mass of business was drawn under its control that the

king and his regular ministers could no longer suffice for the work, and

new judges had to be added to the former staff; and at last the positions of the two chief courts of the kingdom were reversed, and the King's Court took the foremost place in the amount and importance of its business.