The Local Government 105
dred courts with changed presiding officers. Jurisdic-
tion over freemen in private hands was a part of the
regular order of things on the continent, and thought
of as such. It was natural that a vigorous central power,
sucli as there was in England after the Conquest, should
assume that all such power in private hands had passed
there by royal grant, was strictly franchisal, and hence
could be taken back whenever the king saw fit. Histor-
ically such a theory was partly, but not wholly, true.1
We do not know that the Conqueror or his early succes-
sors ever formulated it, but Norman conditions especially
seem to bear it out; and in England the lavish judicial
grants which the Norman rulers occasionally made cer-
tainly implied that they had a good deal to give; and
where they found anyone exercising a jurisdiction so great
as to be prejudicial to themselves, they were fertile in
practical means to limit it. But there came a time when
an English king set himself to theorise on the subject, and
it will be useful, in that connection, to have in mind the
historical background.2 It is possible in this period of
developed feudalism to distinguish a third type of pri-
vate jurisdiction. A lord who had vassals, that is, men
who held from him on feudal tenure, had a jurisdiction
over them which included all matters relating to the law
of fiefs, the strictly feudal law. This was a civil jurisdic-
tion, and of course was never acquired or supposed to have
been acquired by royal grant.
One great cause of confusion in connection with these
varieties of private jurisdiction is that the jurisdiction
in origin and principle was one thing and the court, the
physical thing of time and place, in which it was admin-
istered, might be quite another. The scattering of the
fiefs, already described as a result of the Conquest, made
it hard for many of the great lords to hold courts for their
feudal vassals; they were too widely scattered. Such
courts were occasionally held, and in them would be
administered the feudal law of fiefs and also such degree
1 See above, pp. 38-41, 77, 78. 2 See below, pp. i88f 189.