Law Courts 173
issued for that locality, had not yet been thought of. The
moment a commission was issued, all business included in
the commission stopped for the entire circuit to be visited;
and if commissions were issued for all England, all the
business named was forthwith suspended at the centre.
This lead to a glut of work in the local sessions of the
justices and greatly increased their length. Thus these
general visitations were altogether formidable and burden-
some1—" those tedious old iters," Maitland calls them.
They became one of the standing grievances against
Henry III., and the people were outspoken in their com-
plaints. It became a sort of unwritten law in his reign,
apparently as a result of the general outcry, that they
should be made only once in seven years. This remained
the practice until they ended in the next reign.
One of the great legal reforms of Edward L had to do
with the itinerant justice system; the Statute of West-
minster II., 1285, inaugurated a new regime that in some
of its principal features has lasted to the present day. It
reorganised one of the minor commissions, that of Assize,
and instituted the nisi prius principle. The commission
of Assize replaced the old general iter, and the justices
were relieved of the mass of non-judicial business which
had so long been a relic of their earliest history. This
commission had been that for holding the possessory
assizes and now included only cases concerning real prop-
erty, but before the end of Edward III/s reign it had ex-
panded so as to include almost every action, criminal as
well as civil. However, the very rapid contemporary
development of the justices of the peace2 so reduced the
work of the itinerant justices that their visitations were
never of the old prolonged or burdensome character.
1A most vivid account of the general eyre, especially its burden upon
the people and their involvement in local government, is to be found in
W. C. Holland's little book, The General Eyre. One chronicler, writing of
the Cornwall visitation of 1233, makes the picturesque statement: Eodem
anno fuerunt itinerantes justiciarii in Comubia; quorum metu, omnes ad
sylvas fugerunt. Annals of DunstaUe, p. 135.
3 See below, pp. 198-206.