Law Courts 141
that they were instructed to do when they were sent
out. As It has been aptly expressed, they carried the
king's court down into the locality and did a branch busi-
ness there. They remind one strongly of Charlemagne's
missi, and though they were probably not institutionally
derived from these,1 the same general causes brought them
forth. Charlemagne was suspicious of the loyalty and
efficiency of his counts, and the missi were to check and
supplement the counts' work. Henry I. was suspicious
of the sheriffs, and the English missi were to make known
or remedy the sheriffs' shortcomings. These king's mes-
sengers were soon known as itinerant justices, but the
word justice must not be understood to mean that their
work was wholly judicial. It was nearly two centur-
ies before that was the case. Itinerant justices might be
sent out on purely judicial business, and toward the end of
Henry I.'s reign were probably so sent with some regu-
larity; but their usual work was of a general administra-
tive sort.
The judicial work of either the Saxon witan or the early
Norman king's court was small; it was confined to "great
men and great causes." Many cases in which the prop-
erty rights of the king were more or less directly con-
cerned would come up for trial in the local courts. A
few instances are known in which, even before the Con-
quest, the king sent a representative into a local court or
imposed his order upon that court to the end that a matter
in which he was involved might be speedily and satis-
factorily concluded. After the Conquest, this royal
interference was more frequent. Logically, the next step
in extending this kind of interference would be to draw
the case entirely out of the local court and try it in the
king's court, or what was virtually the king's court owing
to the presence and influence of the king's representatives.
And so itinerant members of the king's court might be
1 Professor Hazeltine believes they were. See his Introduction (p. xiii)
to Holland's The General Eyre. He believes there was a direct line of con-
nection through Norman practice brought into England at the Conquest.
This certainly has not been proved.