township's affairs. A variation of the township was the burgh, or borough, whose population was apt to be larger and whose political independence was greater; but its arrangements for government were similar to those of the ordinary township. A group of townships formed a hundred. At the head of the hundred was a hundred-man, ordinarily elected, but frequently appointed by a great landowner or prelate to whom the lands of the hundred belonged. Assisting the hundred-man was a council of twelve or more freemen. In the hundred-moot was introduced the principle of representation; for to the meetings of that body came the reeve, the parish priest, and four "best men" from each of the townships and boroughs included in the hundred. The hundred-moot met once a month, and it had as its principal function the adjudication of cases, whether civil, criminal, or ecclesiastical. Above the hundred was the shire. Originally, as a rule, the shires were regions occupied by small but independent tribes; in time they became administrative districts of the United Kingdom. At the head of the shire was an ealdorman, appointed by the king and witan, usually from the prominent men of the shire. Subordinate to him at first, but in time overshadowing him, was the shire-reeve, or sheriff, who was essentially a representative of the crown, sent to assume charge of the royal lands in the shire, to collect the king's revenue, and to receive the king's share of the fines imposed in the courts. Each shire had its moot; and, the shires and bishoprics being usually co-terminous, the bishop sat with the ealdorman as joint president of this assemblage. In theory, at least, the shire-moot was a gathering of the freemen of the shire. It met, as a rule, twice a year, and all freemen were entitled to come to it, in person or by representation. Those who did not desire to attend were permitted to send as spokesmen their reeves or stewards; so that the body was likely to assume the character of a mixed primary and representative assembly. The shire-moot decided disputes over land, tried suits for which a hearing could not be obtained in the court of the hundred, and exercised an incidental ecclesiastical jurisdiction.1 1 The classic description of Anglo-Saxon political institutions is W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development (6th ed., Oxford, 1897), especially I, 74-182; but recent scholarship has supplemented and modified at many points the facts and views therein set forth. A useful account (although likewise subject to correction) is H. Taylor, Origins and Growth of the English Constitution (new ed., Boston, 1900), I, Bk. 1, Chaps. iii-v, and a repository of information is J. Ramsay, Foundations of England, 2 vols. (London, 1898). A valuable Norman-Angevin Government. The second, and a much more important, period in the building of the English constitution was the Norman-Angevin era, extending from the landing of William the Conqueror in 1066 to the death of King John in 1216. The aspect of this period which first arrests attention is the enormous growth of the king's power and the building up of a great centralized administrative system of which the king was the autocratic head. Monarchy in Anglo-Saxon days was weak. But the Norman conqueror was a powerful, aggressive, statesmanlike sovereign who with consummate skill maneuvered the results of his invasion in such a way as to make the king the real master of the country. Feudalism, land tenure, military service, taxation, the Church all were bent to serve the interests of the crown. Within a generation England became a united, centralized monarchy of the most absolute type. This was accomplished in part by the dissolution of great earldoms which menaced the monarchy in later Saxon days, and in part by an increase of the power and importance of the sheriffs. It was accomplished mainly, however, by the skillful organization of two great departments of government, i.e., justice and finance, under dignitaries of the royal household, aided by permanent staffs of expert officials. The department of justice comprised the Curia; that of finance, the Exchequer. At the head of the one was the Chancellor; at the head of the other, the Treasurer. The principal officials within the two formed a single body of men, sitting now as justitiarii, or justices, and now as barones of the Exchequer. The profits and costs of administering justice and the receipts and disbursements of the Exchequer were only different aspects of the same fundamental processes of state. The justices of the Curia who held court on circuit throughout the realm and the sheriffs who came up twice a year to render to the barons of the Exchequer an account of the sums due from the shires served as the real and tangible agencies through which the central and local governments were sketch is A. B. White, Making of the English Constitution, 449-1485 (New York, 1908), 16-62. A brilliant book is E. A. Freeman, Growth of the English Constitution (4th ed., London, 1884), although it is to be used with caution because of the author's exaggerated estimate of the survival of Anglo-Saxon institutions in later times. Political and institutional history is fully narrated in T. Hodgkin, History of England to the Norman Conquest (London, 1906), and C. W. C. Oman, England before the Norman Conquest (London, 1910); and an admirable bibliography is C. Gross, Sources and Literature of English History (London, 1900). 1 On the absorption of the administration of justice by the king's courts at the expense of feudal and other tribunals, see E. Jenks, Government of the British Empire (Boston, 1918), 9-12. Anson, Law and Custom of the Constitution, II, Pt. i, 11. knit together. As will appear, it was from the Norman Curia that, in the course of time, sprang several of the departments of administration whose heads constitute the actual executive authority of the British nation to-day. Untrammelled by constitutional restrictions, the Conqueror and his earlier successors recognized only such limitations on the royal authority as were imposed by powerful and turbulent subjects. Associated with the king, however, was from the first a body known as the Commune Concilium, the Common, or Great, Council. "Thrice a year," the Saxon Chronicle tells us, King William wore his crown every year he was in England; at Easter he wore it at Winchester; at Pentecost, at Westminster; and at Christmas, at Gloucester; and at these times all the men of England were with him- archbishops, bishops and abbots, earls, thegns and knights." "All the men of England" means, of course, only the great ecclesiastics, the principal officers of state, and the king's tenants-in-chief in truth, only such of the more important of these as were summoned individually to the sovereign's presence. At least in theory, however, the Norman kings were accustomed to consult this gathering of magnates, very much as their predecessors had consulted the witenagemot, upon all important questions of legislation, finance, and public policy. It may, indeed, be said that the development of this Council forms the central subject of English constitutional history; for, "out of it, directly or indirectly, by one process or another, have been evolved Parliament, the cabinet, and the courts of law." 1 For a half-century after the death of the Conqueror (1087) the new system held up reasonably well, although rather because of the momentum that its founder had imparted to it than because of any contributions made by his successors of this period; indeed, the anarchy of the reign of Stephen (1135-54) almost wrecked the entire mechanism. Then came the astute and energetic Henry II (1154-89), who recovered all that had been lost and added not a little of his own account. "Henry II," it has been said, "found a nation wearied out with the miseries of anarchy, and the nation found in Henry II a king with a passion for administration." With a view to bringing all of his subjects into obedience to a uniform system of law, the great Angevin sovereign waged steady warfare upon both the rebellious nobility and the independent clergy. He was not 2 1 W. Wilson, The State, (rev. ed., Boston, 1918), 183. entirely successful, especially in his conflict with the clergy; but he prevented a permanent reversion of the nation to feudal chaos, and he invested the king's law with a sanction hardly known in even the days of the Conqueror. The reign of Henry II has been declared, indeed, to "initiate the rule of law." By reviving and placing upon a permanent basis the provincial visitations of the royal justices, for both judicial and fiscal purposes, and by extending in the local administration of justice. and finance the principle of the jury, Henry contributed more perhaps than any other person to the development of the English common law, the jury, and the modern hierarchy of courts. By appointing as sheriffs lawyers or soldiers, rather than great barons, he fostered the influence of the central government in local affairs. By commuting military service for a money payment (scutage), and by reviving the ancient militia system (the fyrd), he brought the armed forces of the nation completely under royal control. By frequent summons of the Great Council, and by habitual presentation to it of leading questions of state, he added greatly to the importance of an institution from which Parliament itself was destined somewhat later to spring. The Great Charter (1215). — In the hands of able kings like William the Conqueror and Henry II absolute power, although sometimes working injustice, was in general beneficent and bearable. But in the hands of weak or vicious rulers like Henry II's sons, Richard I and John, it soon became intolerable. Under John a long accumulation of grievances led the strong men of the country, the barons, into open rebellion; and on June 15, 1215, the king, finding himself without a party and facing the loss of his throne, granted the famous body of liberties known as the Great Charter. No document in the history of any nation is of larger importance than this Charter. The whole of English constitutional history, once remarked Bishop Stubbs, is but one long commentary upon it. The significance of the Charter arises not simply from the fact that it was wrested from an unwilling sovereign by concerted action of the various orders. of society (action such as in France and other continental countries never, in medieval times, became possible), but principally from the remarkable summary which it furnishes of the fundamental principles of English government in so far as those principles had ripened by the thirteenth century. The Charter contained little that was new. Its authors sought merely to gather up within a reasonably brief document those principles 1 Stubbs, Select Charters, 21. ་ A and customs which the better kings of England had usually observed, but which in the evil days of Richard and John had been evaded or openly violated. There was no thought of a new form of government, or of a new code of laws, but rather of the redress of present and practical grievances. Not a new constitution, but good government in conformity with the old one, was the object. Naturally, therefore, the instrument was based, in most of its important provisions, upon a charter granted by Henry I in 1100, even as that instrument was based, in the main, upon the righteous laws of the Saxon king, Edward the Confessor. After like manner, the Charter of 1215 became, in its turn, the foundation to which reassertions of constitutional liberty in subsequent times were apt to return; and, under more or less pressure, the Charter itself was "confirmed " by several sovereigns who proved disinclined to observe its principles. In effect, the Charter was a treaty between the king and his dissatisfied subjects. It was essentially a feudal document, and the majority of its provisions related primarily to the privileges and rights of the barons. None the less, it contained clauses that affected all classes of society, and it is noteworthy that the barons and clergy pledged themselves in it to extend to their dependents the same customs and liberties that they were themselves demanding of the crown. Taking the Charter as a whole, it guaranteed the freedom of the Church, defined afresh and in precise terms surviving feudal obligations and customs, placed safeguards about the liberties of the boroughs, pledged security of property and of trade, and laid down important regulations concerning government and law, notably that whenever the king should propose the assessment of "scutages " or of unusual financial "aids," he should take the advice of the General Council, composed of the tenants-in-chief, summoned individually in the case of the greater ones and through the sheriffs in the case of those of lesser importance. Certain general clauses, e.g., one pledging that justice should neither be bought nor sold, and another prescribing that a freeman should not be imprisoned, outlawed, or dispossessed of his property save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land, undertook to guarantee impartial and unvarying justice; while running through the entire instrument was the idea of limitation upon autocratic power not, indeed, a twentieth-century notion of constitu 1 1 The term "peers," as here employed, means only equals in rank. The clause does not imply trial by jury. It is simply a guarantee that the barons should not be judged by persons of feudal rank inferior to their own. Jury trial was becoming common in the thirteenth century, but it was not guaranteed in the Great Charter. |