170 The Period of Constitution Making
trusted the sheriffs, and they found that the thing worked
There was in England the right kind of stuff out of which
to make juries,x
With this discussion of the jury, is concluded the ac-
count of the new business and the new methods which
the king's court was assuming in the late twelfth and
early thirteenth centuries. But the increased business
had an important influence upon the court itself; its
old structure and organisation had become insufficient,
and it is necessary to consider next how it was adapted
to the new demands. The king had been making the ju-
dicial business of the country his own; an important
specialisation of his court for judicial business resulted;
a court in the modern sense of the word was made out of
the king's court, where the word court has its broader
and earlier meaning. Certain specialisations of this court
in the reign of Henry I. have been noticed.a These were
all revived at the beginning of Henry II.'s reign, but no
one of them was a thorough-going judicial specialisation.
But during his reign and the century following, two of
them, the itinerant justices and the Exchequer, under-
went a development along judicial lines that transformed
them.
The Assize of Clarendon marks an important turning
point in the history of the itinerant justices. After that,
the criminal cases that were being drawn into the king's
court3 and the new possessory actions formed the principal
1 The Plantagenet kings were seeking to develop the jury in much the
same way in Normandy and Anjou, probably not much in Aquitaine.
But the royal courts grew more slowly in these less homogeneous provinces,
no commonjaw was growing, and when they were lost to England they
gradually slipped back into the condition of the rest of France, where the
old sworn inquest had been changing into the canonical inquisition. But
"when all has been said, the almost total disappearance in Prance of
the old enqu&te du pays in favour of the enqutte of the canon law, at the very
time when the inquisitio patricB is carrying all before it in England, is one
of the grand problems in the comparative history of the two nations."
P. and M. ii., 604.
a See above, pp. 139, 140.
3 Ibid., p. 162, note 2, on how cases begun by private appeal as well as
by jury presentment were getting into the king's court.