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courts, our direct evidence is of the scantiest. We have to supplement it with indications derived from the Norman and later times.

      After the Norman Conquest, as time went on, the king’s justice became organized and regular, and superseded nearly all the functions of the ancient county and hundred courts. But the king’s power to do justice of an extraordinary kind was far from being abandoned. The great constructive work of Henry II. and Edward I. made it less important for a time. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it showed its vitality in the hands of the king’s chancellors, and became the root of the modern system of equity.46 Down to our own time that system preserved the marks of its origin in the peculiar character of the compulsion exercised by courts of equitable jurisdiction. Disobedience to their process and decrees was a direct and special contempt of the king’s authority, and a “commission [p.18] of rebellion” might issue against a defendant making default in a chancery suit, however widely remote its subject-matter might be from the public affairs of the kingdom.47

      

      The charters that inform us of what was done, especially in 803 and 825, at the synods or synodal councils of Clovesho,49 that “famous place” whose situation is now matter of mere conjecture,50 leave no doubt that on these occasions, at least, the same assembly which is called a synod also acted as the witan. The secular and spiritual functions of these great meetings might have been discriminated by lay members not taking part in the ecclesiastical business; but it is by no means certain that they were.51 In any case it is highly probable that the prohibitions above cited were never meant to apply to the great men of the kingdom, or royal foundations, or the king’s immediate followers.

      Thus the hundred court was the judicial unit, so to speak, for ordinary affairs. We have no evidence that any lesser public court [p.19] existed. It is quite possible that some sort of township meeting was held for the regulation of the common-field husbandry which prevailed in most parts of England: and the total absence of any written record of such meetings, or (so far as we know) allusion to them, hardly makes the fact less probable. But we have no ground whatever for concluding that the township-moot, if that were its name, had any properly judicial functions. “Mark-moot,” which has been supposed to be the name of a primary court, appears rather to mean a court held on the marches of adjacent counties or hundreds, or perhaps on the boundary dyke itself.54

      The ordinances which tell us of the times of meeting appointed for the county and hundred courts tell us nothing whatever of their procedure. It may be taken as certain, however, that they had no efficient mode of compelling the attendance of parties or enforcing their orders. A man who refused to do justice to others according to the law could only be put out of the protection of the law, save in the cases which were grave enough to call for a special expedition against him. Outlawry, developed in the Danish period as a definite part of English legal process, remained such until our own time. All this is thoroughly characteristic of archaic legal systems in general. Nothing in it is peculiarly English, not much is peculiarly Germanic.

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