324 The Period of Constitution Making
comparable to that in England, the baronage for many
reasons was a different baronage, and the slogan that the
ting was tinder the law did not arise. The English king
had not been able to hold his chancery to a unity. The
long-continued and constantly shifting royal-baronial
conflict was the main cause of the repeated duplications
and the existence at any given time of departments of
government relatively personal to the king and of others
more baronial, or, as the barons would probably have been
pleased to term them, more national. The results of
aristocratic opposition in England are to be found in
Parliament, though not until the late middle ages and
not very consciously worked out; they are to be found in
all the long history of Magna Carta and in the depositions
of two kings in the fourteenth century; but they are also
to be found in these unpremeditated and peculiar develop-
ments in the sphere of what we may venture to term
general administration.
4. The King's Use of the People in Government.—•
Some of the ways in which the mass of the people took
part in government have been shown. In the Anglo-
Saxon period there was much that indicates that the
local government was older and more important than
the central government; the people were still, at the end
of the period, running their local courts in a way that
reminds us of a time when it was that kind of govern-
ment, sprung from the people's initiative, or nothing.1
In the early post-Conquest time, the local government,
now feeling the stern touch of authority from the center,
continued important and, as in the case of the frank-
pledge system, was being completed and organised; and
it reached down to, and demanded the service of, the
very lowest classes,2 But what was to be the permanent
policy of the great Norman and Angevin kings? How
were they to meet the problems of local law and order
and the minutiae of local administration? It is not hard
to imagine the first indication of an answer to these
1 See above, pp. 66-69. * Ibid., pp. 108-110.