is English and Continental Backgrounds
than enforcible against all freemen had begun.1 But,
notwithstanding this, it may be said of the shire court, as
of the hundred court, that it was, and always remained,
an essentially popular assembly.
In these courts, a body of unwritten customary law was
being administered by the people from whom it had
sprung, and in whose hands it was undergoing a natural
development. It was, however, a primitive law, dealing
largely with criminal matters, but with no conscious dis-
tinction between what was criminal and what was civil.
Deeds of violence were common, especially manslaughter,
wounding, and cattle-stealing. The Anglo-Saxon period
strikingly illustrates the transition from the early state of
society, in which men right their own wrongs, to the time
when something which may roughly be called the state
steps in between the wrongdoer and the wronged and
does the righting. The individual or the kin still had
much to do with it, but there were public courts which
prescribed just how it should be done and took a large
share in the procedure.2
Apart from procedure in the actual presence of a court
of law, there were the ever recurring problems of the pur-
suit and capture of a fleeing criminal, the forcing of any-
one resting under any kind of charge or summons to
present himself before the court, and, when cases ended
with fines imposed, as so many did, the ensuring of the
fine's discharge. The co-operation among neighbours,
townships, and later, larger units, to track down and seize
the fleeing wrongdoer must have been among the first
*It was a tendency characteristic of the middle ages to territoriallse
public duties. To exact such duties of large bodies of men by dealing with
them personally overtaxed the slight executive powers of the time. A
piece of land was a stable thing, always to be found, and could stand for a
fixed amount of public service to be enforced against its holder or holders,
without reference to changing numbers or personnel. The attempts in
the later^ Anglo-Saxon period to bring under lords all freemen who lacked
substantial landed property, the lords representing them in the courts,
favoured the territorialising of suit of court. Preeholding rather than per-
sonal freedom was becoming the measure of some at least of the political
burdens. See below, p. 38, note i.
a For a valuable account of this procedure, see P. and^M. ii.. 598-603:
also Maitland and Montague, Sketch of English Legal History, ch. i.