16 English and Continental Backgrounds
centre. This probably indicates that the towns are older
than the shires, the former having been used as fortresses
by the West Saxon kings or perhaps created for that
purpose. Worcester, Northampton, and Bedford are ex-
amples of this group. The northern shires, representing
pieces of the ancient Northumberland and Strathclyde,
have, for the most part, originated since the Norman Con-
quest.1 It was undoubtedly the unifying and organising
activities of the West Saxon kings in the ninth and tenth
centuries that did much to change the earlier territorial
confusion into the two grades of local division with the
name hundred applied to the smaller and shire to the
larger.
In both hundred and shire, popular assemblies were
regularly held. That of the hundred, the hundred court,
as it is usually called, had to do with judicial matters only.
From the tenth century, it met normally every four
weeks.2 It was competent to deal with cases of all sorts,
and a case once decided in it could not be carried to a
higher court. In fact there was no such thing as appeal,
in the modern technical sense, in the Anglo-Saxon judi-
cial system. The hundred court, however, might, and
often did, refuse to entertain a case3 or fail to reach a de-
cision in one. Such cases might then be taken to the
shire court, and, if not decided there, to the king; and
occasionally cases were carried directly from the hundred
to the king.4 But taking cases to the king was discour-
aged. In early times the hundred court was convened by
1 See Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, § 48.
2 There seems no doubt that there were local popular courts in districts
including a number of townships long before there was any regular division
of the country into hundreds and shires. The use of a small territorial
division for police purposes, perhaps its creation to that end, appears
to have been one of the very earliest of governmental efforts among
Germanic peoples.
3 Perhaps because of its importance; but more often it was because of
some malice or disability under which the party to the suit was labouring, or
the unrighteous use of power on the part of a local lord.
4 See Stubbs, Select Charters, pp. 83, 86. ''The suitor who comes before
tne^Mng comes not to get a mistake corrected but to lodge a complaint
against his judges; they have wilfully denied him justice." Maitland,
C. H. E.t p. 106.