184 The Period of Constitution Making"
were attempting to withdraw from it entirely, and dur-
ing the thirteenth century many of them, especially those
who represented great religious houses, purchased or
were freely granted charters of exemption. Some
simply stopped coming and, in course of time, claimed
and obtained exemption through prescription. Thus by
the late thirteenth century, the shire court was for
small cases and small people.
A clause of the Statute of Gloucester, 1278, was so
interpreted as to make the cases grow still smaller.
The clause in question seems on its face to have quite
another object; it says that none is to have a writ of trespass
in the king's courts unless he will affirm that the goods taken
away were worth forty shillings at the least. This seems
to have been construed to imply a very different rule, namely
that no action for more than forty shall be brought in a
local court.1
By 1290, this had become law, and, as money decreased
in purchasing power, the number of cases brought before
a shire court grew steadily less. By the end of the fif-
teenth century, its judicial work was of little importance;
yet it continued into modern times a court for petty civil
suits. But no statute brought this side of its activity
to an end or changed the limitation set in 1278 until the
erection of the new county courts in 1846. The shire
court had always had some functions that were not judi-
cial, and it lasted for the purpose of electing such local
officials as coroners and verderers and, a far more im-
portant matter, the knights to represent the shire in
Parliament.2
Much that has been said of the process by which the
shire court ceased to be a judicial body applies to the
hundred court, but there are some distinctive points in
1 Maitland, Introduction to Select, Pleas in Manorial Courts, p. Ivi.
2 The freeholders no longer attended when It was acting as court of
law, the sheriff or his deputy constituting the court. The freeholders
went only when members of Parliament were to be elected.