138 The Period of Constitution Making
ciality, the falseness of any scheme of arrangement, logical
or chronological. But he must either not write at all or
choose an untrue scheme and trust to cross-references
and the intelligence of the reader. There is some justifi-
cation in taking the courts first, for so much was done in
the twelfth century in developing the king's court and
founding the common law, though much was left for the
thirteenth and even later centuries.1 The great, non-
specialised power of king and Council, interpenetrating
both courts and Parliament, will be treated next, and in
that connection the organs of administration through
which central executive authority operated, and the all-
important governmental work of the people in the locali-
ties under the king's command. But the barons fought
to control the king and Council, using and developing the
principle of the supremacy of the law*f and the barons
often believed and often made others believe that they
spoke for the nation. Thus the examination of a new,
extra-royal source of authority enters here and the begin-
nings of limited monarchy. Parliament, dealt with third,
was becoming recognisable as such by the early fourteenth
century; and Parliament—made by the king and used
by him for his own purposes and, like most early features
of government, largely judicial in its work—had, before
the close of our period, shown that it could upon occasion
draw to an issue with the king and embody an authority
outside him, and also that its future lay in the field of
legislation.
1" Of all centuries the twelfth is the most legal. In no other age, since
the classical days of the Roman law, has so large a part of the sum total
of intellectual endeavour been devoted to jurisprudence."—P. and M.
i., iii. "In the natural course of all constitutional history the judicial
precedes the legislative."—Shirley, Preface to Royal Letters [Rolls Series]
ii, p. xviii.