io6 The Norman Conquest
'a-
of criminal jurisdiction as the lord might possess over his
vassals. But such strictly feudal courts were never prom-
inent in England and, as will be shown, ended early.
When such courts existed it was characteristic of them
to have no regular time or place of meeting; the vassals
came when and where the lord summoned them. But
it was more common for the lord to exercise his jurisdic-
tions in a regularly meeting local court. When a whole
hundred had passed under a lord's control, the hundred
court would be the place to administer most of his juris-
diction over freemen. But when, as was commoner, he
had only part of a hundred, that part would probably
coincide closely with one or more of his manors, and all
of his jurisdictional rights might be exercised in his
manor courts.
Another way of getting at the same matter is to enquire
in what courts the three classes of laymen, villeins, non-
noble freemen, and nobles, would ordinarily appear. The
villein was entirely under the jurisdiction of his lord
in the manorial court; his lord's steward presided and
his fellow serfs and probably the freemen on the same
manor were his judges. The non-noble freeman was under
the jurisdiction of his lord, where such jurisdiction be-
longed to the latter of ancient right or had been acquired
through the new disposition of the land, or he might still
be subject to the hundred court, as yet a public court.
When the freeman was tried in the manorial court, he
was judged by the other freemen of the manor, probably
not often by the villeins. The noble was tried in the
lord's feudal court and by his fellow vassals (in a special
sense he was judged by his peers) when his lord held
such a court. But where the fiefs were badly scattered,
it was more common for the lord to have local groups of
his vassals come to one of his manor courts and admin-
ister his feudal jurisdiction in that connection. It would
be quite common, then, for all three types of private juris-
diction to be administered in the manor court. Cer-
tainly this became the rule by the end of the thirteenth