i8o The Period of Constitution Making
both communal and private, have been discussed.1 We
begin here with the situation as found in the early part of
Henry I.'s reign. Private jurisdiction was increasing
under the impulse of continental thought. Henry had
attempted to correct the irregularities in the hundred and
shire courts for which the sheriff had been largely response
ble in his brother's time, and the sheriff, a royal officer
had become the only presiding and constituting official
in those courts. This last fact, taken in conjunction with
a livelier conception of the king as the source of law and
the masterful character of the post-Conquest sovereigns,
leads one to look for an important change in the local
courts, There are clear indications that the change was
beginning under Henry I.
There were meetings of the county court that re-
quired such full attendance and entertained such a class
of cases as make it clear that they were different from the
ordinary meetings. Their composition was strikingly
like that of the later itinerant justice courts; cases in
which the king was specially concerned were tried there,
and also cases between the vassals of different lords, such
as on the continent would usually have been carried before
a suzerain's court.2 When the king ordered this specially
full attendance for doing this kind of business and the
presiding sheriff was perhaps more emphatically the king's
representative than wont, the shire court had, for the
time, become a king's court. It is probable also that in
the course of the reign itinerant justices were sent out
with some regularity and that such courts were summoned
to meet them.3
1 See Part II, § II, i.
2 Such cases might also be tried in the court of the defendant's lord.
3 Three instances of a king's court in the locality in the reign of William
I. have been found. They were summoned by royal writ, justices presided
and were distinctly in loco regis, the judgment was of the same force as
that of the central court; and, while a baronial element and the county
court were present, they were not essential to the court's authority, which
was centrally derived and royal, not local. See G. B. Adams, The Local
Kings Court in the Reign of William I., Yale Law Journal, xxiii., 490-510.
See also his study of Henry I.'s writ concerning the hundred and shire
courts (for the text of this writ, see Stubbs, Select Charters, p. 122) and