186 The Period of Constitution Making
dred court became a superfluity and soon had no work to
do; but no formal act brought it to an end.1
Before speaking of the decline of the second class of
local courts, those in private hands, a word should be
said of the borough courts.2 The boroughs had been
steadily acquiring privileges during the twelfth century,
and their courts were flourishing. These courts were
destined, in the course of time, to become assimilated, in
a general way, to the new royal, local system, and were
to be permanent in all the more important boroughs.
But until they had thus gained some common character-
istics, it is hard to generalise about them.3 They still
corresponded loosely to the hundred courts, but, as has
been shown,4 boroughs had passed under lords, and the
extent to which, in the thirteenth century, they were
independent of their lords' jurisdiction varied infinitely.
The boroughs were naturally suspicious of the new-
fangled methods of the king's courts, which seemed so
potent in extending royal jurisdiction, and were, at this
time, holding to the old forms. The more important
sessions of the borough courts were probably supposed to
be attended by all the burgesses, who were to find the
judgments after the fashion of the suitors in the shire
and hundred courts. But, as in the shire courts, there
was a tendency, from early times, to place this function
justices, most of whom had no regular legal training, handled criminal
cases, even involving the death penalty; but the intricate land law and
other technicalities of civil rights were not to be entrusted to them. It
was not until the nineteenth century that proper provision was made in
the localities for minor civil jurisdiction.
1 The provision in the County Courts Act of 1867 to the effect that no
action, which can be brought in a county court (in the later sense), shall
be brought in a hundred or other inferior court that is not a court of rec-
ord may perhaps be said to mark in a distant way the formal ending of
hundredal jurisdiction.
3 For a full account of the borough courts and the law administered in
them, see Miss Bateson's Introduction to Borough Customs, vol. ii. (Sd-
den Society Publications.)
3 "The cities and boroughs—vills, that is, which have attained to a cer-
tain degree of organisation and independence—have courts of their own.
But of these municipal courts very little can be said in general terms;
they are the outcome not of laws, but of privileges."—P. and M., i, 532,
* See above, p. x 11.