150 The Period of Constitution Making
tacit assumption that crime concerned the individual and
not society; and through bribery, intimidation, or, in the
case of manslaughter, the indifference or lack of kin, very
many criminals were not brought to trial. Sooner or
later every advancing state has reached the point where
it recognises that crime wrongs society and that the prose-
cution of suspects cannot be left wholly to private initia-
tive. There is special interest in the way in which this
forward step was taken in England. Crime of all sorts
had increased with impunity in Stephen's time, and here
the peace problem pressed upon Henry. With his hands
freer from continental matters than before, he now ad-
dressed himself to it. His method was to make regular
in his own court the already slightly used machinery for
finding suspected criminals, and to impose new and cruel
punishments upon those convicted. Quick retribution
was to impend over every murderer, robber, or thief, or
those who harboured such. Twelve men from each hun-
dred and four from each vill were to give information on
oath, based either on their own knowledge or on common
report, whether there were at that time in their localities
suspected murderers, robbers, thieves, or the receivers of
them. The men thus named were put to the old form
of proof, the ordeal. The Assize of Clarendon, whose
first article instituted this new procedure in the king's
courts, was drawn up in view of an immediate journey of
the justices throughout the land. But the new method of
detection was not confined to the use of the justices; the
sheriffs were also to use it, and, when the old shire court
had declined and lost its criminal business, it became the
basis of a new, but limited criminal jurisdiction of the
sheriff.1
In the Assize of Northampton,2 ten years after the
Assize of Clarendon, the king was still fighting crime by
the same method, but forgery and arson were added to
the crimes that were thus being drawn into the royal
1 See below, pp. 181, 182.
2 A. and $., document 16, and W. and N., pp. 56-58.