made it easy for the baron to assume and keep in his hands the administrative functions of the government throughout a district and to break off all judicial dependence of the local courts upon the national. To be independent of the king administratively and judicially was to be really independent, whatever theoretical dependence there might be. No such independence was possible in England. The king always kept a firm hand on the local administrative officer, the sheriff, and though extensive grants were made of rights of jurisdiction to monasteries and private lords, even including the execution of criminals in certain cases, these "liberties" were practically an interference with local rather than with national justice-they were indeed hardly felt during the Norman period to be an interference with justice at all. The royal supervision, as exercised by the curia regis, over the local administration of justice was more close and effective than ever before, and at this time the chief advantage to the lord from possessing a liberty," and the chief loss to the state in granting it, was financial -the transfer to a private individual of the profits from the courts. No baron however powerful, was released from his own responsibility to the justice of the king, and his tenant always had an appeal from the worst abuses even of the baronial court proper to the royal protection. English baron also never had a right to maintain his castle against the king. The castle was the king's, the baron was its governor for the king. In rebellion, but in rebellion only, the baron defended his castle against the sovereign.

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There were also certain moral advantages, less material but no less real, which the king possessed. The anointing in the ceremony of coronation made him a consecrated king. In the feeling of the time it gave him a special divine right and made rebellion seem to have to some extent at least the character of sacrilege. Again it was the Norman practice, coming down from the earlier Frankish state, that each rear vassal in swearing allegiance to his lord reserved his

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allegiance to the king, and the king occasionally took from all holders of land a direct oath of fidelity to himself.1 In times of actual rebellion this oath did not hold rear vassals as a class to their allegiance to the king, but it must have made organized insurrection a little more difficult and have acted as a deterrent in individual cases. Altogether the Norman king of England was the most powerful element in the state, and the most powerful sovereign in the Europe of that day. His preponderance of power was so great that even the palatine earldoms, where the king's writs did not run, which had an administrative and judicial independence, and which were large and fairly compact principalities, never asserted a political independence for themselves.

In Saxon times, as we have seen, two officers represented the central administrative and governmental system in the shires and connected the national and the local governments, the ealdorman or earl and the sheriff. In their government at home the Normans had been prepared to understand and go on with both these offices. The vassal counts of the Norman duke differed very decidedly from the original Saxon ealdorman. They were more feudal, less official. As the result of changes which followed the Danish conquest, the later Saxon earl approached the Norman type more nearly but still was not the same. The Norman Conquest made still more extensive changes. The Saxon name "earl" survived but practically nothing else of the older institution. The earl after 1066 was not in any sense an officer. He still took his title from a shire, which began now to be called a county, and he still received at least in some cases the "third penny " of its judicial revenues but, except in the case of the palatine earldoms, he had nothing to do with its government. The name is a title merely, indicating rank in the baronage and, if it carried anything else with it in a particular case, that had to be indicated by a special grant. 1 Stubbs, S. C., 96.

By such grants extensive royal rights of jurisdiction and administration were conveyed to the palatine earldoms, especially of Chester on the Welsh border, and of Durham, held by the bishop, on the Scottish. These departures from the ordinary practice in England were apparently fully justified for military reasons by the constantly disturbed condition of the borders. In general, however, the earldom as

an official institution disappeared with the Conquest.

The Normans were also prepared to understand the office of the Saxon sheriff, even more clearly than the position of the earl. They had inherited from the West Frankish empire the office of vicecomes, or representative of the count, the count's deputy either in the whole or in a local division of his territory. The territory of the count of Normandy was so large that he naturally employed a number of vicecomites in different districts in which they looked after his interests and performed financial duties very much like those of the Saxon sheriff. The English office was probably better worked out and more definite in character than the Norman at the time of the Conquest and apparently it became the leader in the development which followed in both states, a development which was a logical continuation of the Saxon history of the office.

The sheriff shared as a matter of course in the increased power of the king because he was the king's representative in the shire, enforcing his rights and protecting his interests. On the other hand the local power of the sheriff sustained and rendered effective the central government, for he was in Norman as in Saxon times the chief instrument of centralization. A great baron of the shire was usually appointed its sheriff, sometimes of several nearby shires also, more rarely with some hereditary right to the office, but the danger which had been so serious from the counts in the later Carolingian state, that the office would be turned into a family possession and made the center of an independent principality, was avoided in England. The Norman mon

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archy was too strong. It was able to keep the sheriff in the position of an officer of the government and hold him to a strict accountability, and even to prevent in the main the financial oppression of the smaller people of the county which the sheriff's opportunities made a constant temptation. Not very long at any rate after the reign of William I, if not in his time, the sheriff paid into the king's treasury a definite sum for the county, which had been fixed upon as representing fairly the annual return to the government. This sum, called the sheriff's ferm or farm, the rent which he paid, was made up from two sources, the income from the king's domain manors in the county, and the proceeds of justice in the local courts. After paying his ferm whatever surplus remained was the sheriff's own, his compensation, but the counties were never put up to the highest bidder.

Besides his relation to the local justice of shire and hundred, which continued the same as in Saxon times, the sheriff was intimately concerned with the new royal local justice which was introduced by the Normans. In the local king's court, which begins to be somewhat frequently employed by William I to carry the curia regis into the counties, and which was held by authority of a royal writ naming justices to preside,2 the sheriff was often commissioned as the justice or one of them. The fines imposed in these courts, he collected as something additional to his ferm, and his office shared the increased importance of the king's peace and of the pleas of the crown, which will be later considered. In the end this new system of royal justice was to be one of the chief causes in undermining the sheriff's power, but at first it added to it. The great age of the sheriff, as the indispensable agent of the central government was from the Conquest to past the beginning of the thirteenth century. During most of this period he was the chief instrument through which the government acted in the local units of the kingdom and secured the necessary 2 A. and S., 2.

centralization. He was at once responsible to the national government for its interests in local financial matters, in maintaining order, in the administration of justice, and in getting out the military service due the state. It was when the state in the thirteenth century began to get better ways of looking after these interests that the power and importance of the sheriff rapidly declined, and he became finally but little more than the executive officer of the courts.

In no department of the public life of England did the coming in of a stronger monarchy lead to more immediate change than in the church, and in two contrary directions. The church became at once less independent and more independent. Before the Conquest William had held the Norman church under a far stronger control than the central government had been able to exercise at any time in Saxon history. This power he transferred in full to England and began a supremacy of the state which, though later weakened and at times greatly weakened, was never entirely lost. The historian Eadmer, writing about twenty years after the death of William, said that it was the king's purpose to exercise the same rights over the church in England which he and his fathers had possessed in Normandy, and he states three rules governing the relation between church and state under William which were certainly long observed and fundamental in this field of public law. They were that no pope should be recognized in England without the king's consent, nor papal letters received which had not first been shown to him; that no enactments of English councils should be valid without his approval; and that barons and officials of the king should not be put on trial in the church courts, nor excommunicated, nor constrained by severe ecclesiastical penalties without his consent. The church was brought under a stricter control by the general government than it had been before subject to, but at the same time its national organization was improved, the standard of clerical morals • Stubbs, S. C., 96; Cheyney, Readings, 110.