144 The Period of Constitution Making
their cases tried in this new court had to pay for the
privilege, they had to buy the originating writs. There
was thus a transaction profitable to both parties. Men
liked to get their cases into the king's court, for they felt
surer of justice there; the king liked to have them buy
the privilege, for it swelled his revenue.
The central government was in a most vigorous condi-
tion at the close of Henry L's reign. Almost any future
seemed possible for the fertile and adaptable royal court.
But it was a critical point in its history. This central
system was young and lacked the hard and fast qualities
of one of long standing, well known and taken for granted
by the people. It still needed guiding and sustaining,
When these were suddenly withdrawn by Henry's death
and his successor's ill-advised quarrel with the adminis-
trative family, and the country experienced a long period
of civil war and general anarchy, the promising govern-
mental beginnings passed away. That Henry II. had
a genius for government, that he came to the throne while
his grandfather's system was still remembered, that he
himself had been trained to understand and appreciate it,
above all, that it had, during the anarchy in England,
been continued and perhaps developed in Normandy by
Geoffrey Plantagenet, Henry II. 's father, were vitally
important conditions of England's later institutional
growth, especially along judicial lines.
and his reign stands pre-
England. When he came
to the throne he saw lawlessness everywhere. His ambi-
tion, like that of the Norman kings, was to gain for him-
with merely private rights, it would closely resemble a French coutume." —
P. and M. i., 107, 108.
"Among the most permanent and momentous effects of that great
event" (the Norman Conquest) "was its effect on the language of English
lawyers, for it is not a small thing that a law-book produced in the Eng-
land of the thirteenth century will look very like some statement of a
French coutume and utterly unlike the Sachsenspiegel, nor is it a small
thing that in much later days such foreign influences as will touch our
English law will always be much rather French than German."— Ibid.,
i, 87-