JLaw Uourts 143

formal and Important, was written u Hence It was called
awrit* a name wfiich," up to that time, had'borne no special
legal sense. These cases jrcre_aJl.xib& and the rule be-
came established that everj^dyil.case tried in. the kingls
f^SE"a writ

With the opening of this possibility, men would try
to get their cases into the king's court if there were any
advantage to be gained by the change. There was an
advantage in the better law and better methods employed.
The old procedure of the local courts was clumsy and
Inflexible; owing to Its formalism, it often failed to render
justice and was not fitted to meet the changing conditions
which followed the Conquest. The king's court began
to supply what was essentially an equitable jurisdiction;
it was free from the trammels of the old formalism and was
doing justice by the most direct means possible. It was
a court made up of Frenchmen, where the French language
was used ; but it did not simply transfer French or Norman
law to England. It made use of any principles, French
or English, which suited Its need, and It did not hesitate
to strike out on new lines.2 But men who wished to have

1 For a primitive writ belonging to the reign of Henry L, see A. and S.f
document 9.

2 "Of the law that this court administered we know little, only we may
guess that in a certain sense it was equity rather than strict law. On the
one hand the royal tribunal cannot have held itself straitly bound by
the old English law; the men who sat in it were Frenchmen, few of whom
could understand a word of English. On the other hand it must often
have happened that the traditional Norman customs would not meet the
facts, for a Norman count and a Norman bishop would be quarrelling
over the titles of their English antecessores, and producing English land-
books. Besides the king didn't mean that England should be another
Normandy, he meant to have at least all the rights that his cousin and
predecessor had enjoyed. ..." His JH2^P£B^^

" occasional," "dealing with an tmprecedente7rstSteaTT3fl^
facts byjoew^pedients, wav^was wavered the balance oFpowePbe-
'

surroundings. In retrospect it would appear to a man of H5nTy~XT."ts'
day^aS^something so unlike the laga Edwardi that it must be pronounced
distinctively unEnglish, and therefore distinctively Norman, and Norman
in a sense it was. It was not a jurisprudence that had been transplanted
from Normandy; but it had been developed by a court composed of
Frenchmen to meet cases in which Frenchmen were concerned; the lan-
guage in which men spoke it was French, and in the end so far as it dealt