332 The Fenod of Constitution Making
ments, or difficult charges in which witnessing and
memory are lacking and responsibility is large.
Viewed as a whole, these uses of the citizens in govern-
ment, in courts of law and outside, present a burden
which seems unbearable. There must have been ways
of mitigating them, some devices of collaboration or of
doing service by turns. But with whatever allowance,
it must be concluded that unpaid-for work and risks for
the state made one of the two or three leading facts and
shaping influences in the lives of, say, the hundred
thousand knights and freeholders or indeed also in those
of the possible three hundred thousand peasants of that
time. As compared with the direct and final use of
officials there was involved a vast amount of trouble,
from planning and instruction on the part of the king or
his ministers to the endless summonses, selections, and
assemblings in the localities. It is a great wonder that
the king in the interest of what he thought efficiency and
personal profit believed it was worth while. It is a greater
wonder and a notable commentary upon medieval Eng-
lishmen if it really was. But to look at another side, it
seems pretty clear that, for better or for worse, the lives,
the limbs, the property, the prosperity or adversity, the
happiness or sorrow of the bulk of the English population
in three-quarters of the crises of their lives depended
upon the knowledge, discretion, good will, or judgment of
their neighbours. This was self-government; but self-
government not in spite of the king but at the king's
command.
There is not space here to follow the detail of this
local work in the centuries following the thirteenth; and
indeed this feature of English history has not yet been
sufficiently studied in the late middle ages to make this
possible. But there is much to indicate that though
forms and methods changed and some of the old local
institutions, especially the communal and manor courts,
were passing away, yet the fundamental principle that
the people must bear the chief burden of local government