[of considerable moment. 3. The introduction and establishment of the grand assize, or trial by special kind of jury, in a writ of right, at the option of the tenant or defendant, instead of the barbarous and Norman trial by battel. 4. To this time must also be referred the introduction of escuage, or pecuniary commutation for personal military service; which in process of time was the parent of the antient subsidies granted to the Crown by parliament, and the land-tax of later times.

Richard the first, a brave and magnanimous prince, was a sportsman as well as a soldier; and therefore enforced the forest laws with some rigour, which occasioned many discontents among his people; though (according to Matthew Paris) he repealed the penalties of castration, loss of eyes, and cutting off the hands and feet, before inflicted on such as transgressed in hunting; probably finding that their severity prevented prosecutions. He also, when abroad, composed a body of naval laws at the isle of Oleron, which are still extant, and of high authority; for in his time we began again to discover that (as an island) we were naturally a maritime power. But, with regard to civil proceedings, we find nothing very remarkable in this reign, except a few regulations regarding the Jews, and the justices in eyre; the king's thoughts being chiefly taken up by the knight errantry of a croisade against the Saracens in the holy land.

In King John's time, and that of his son, Henry the third, the rigours of the feudal tenures and the forest laws were so warmly kept up, that they occasioned many insurrections of the barons or principal feudatories; which, at last, had this effect, that, first, King John, and afterwards his son, consented to the two famous charters of English liberties, Magna Charta and Charta de Forestâ. Of these the latter was well calculated to redress many grievances and encroachments of the Crown in the exertion of forest law; and the former confirmed many liberties of the church, and redressed many grievances incident to feudal

[tenures, of no small moment at the time: though now, unless considered attentively and with this retrospect, they seem but of trifling concern. But, besides these feudal provisions, care was also taken therein to protect the subject against other oppressions, then frequently arising from unreasonable amercements, from illegal distresses or other process for debts or services due to the Crown, and from the tyrannical abuse of the prerogative of purveyance and pre-emption. It fixed the law relative to the forfeiture of lands for felony, and prohibited for the future the grants of exclusive fisheries, and the erection of new bridges, so as to oppress the neighbourhood. With respect to private rights, it established the testamentary power of the subject over part of his personal estate, the rest being distributed among his wife and children; it regulated the law of dower; and prohibited the appeals of women, unless for the death of their husbands. In matters of public police and national concern, it enjoined an uniformity of weights and measures; gave new encouragements to commerce, by the protection of merchant strangers; and forbade the alienation of lands in mortmain. With regard to the administration of justice, besides prohibiting all denials or delays of it, it fixed the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster, that the suitors might no longer be harassed with following the king's person in all his progresses; and, at the same time, brought the trial of issues home to the very doors of the freeholders, by directing assizes to be taken in the proper counties, and establishing annual circuits: it also corrected some abuses then incident to the trials by wager of law and of battel; directed the regular awarding of inquests for life or member; prohibited the king's inferior ministers from holding pleas of the Crown, or trying any criminal charge, whereby many forfeitures might otherwise have unjustly accrued to the exchequer; and regulated the time and place of holding the inferior tribunals of justice, the county-court, sheriff's tourn, and court-leet.

[It confirmed and established the liberties of the city of London, and all other cities, boroughs, towns, and ports of the kingdom. And, lastly, (which alone would have merited the title that it bears, of the great charter,) it protected every individual of the nation in the free enjoyment of his life, his liberty, and his property, unless declared to be forfeited by the judgment of his peers, or the law of the land (7).

However, by means of these struggles the pope, in the reign of King John, gained a still greater ascendant here than he ever had before enjoyed, which continued through the long reign of his son, Henry the third, in the beginning of whose time the old Saxon trial by ordeal was also totally abolished. And we may, by this time, perceive in Bracton's treatise a still further improvement in the method and regularity of the common law, especially in the point of pleadings (m). Nor must it be forgotten, that the first traces which remain of the separation of the greater barons from the less, in the constitution of parliaments, are found in the great charter of King John, though omitted in that of Henry the third; and that towards the end of the latter of these reigns we find the first record of any writ for summoning knights, citizens, and burgesses to parliament. And here we conclude the second period of our English legal history.

III. The third period commences with the reign of Edward the first, who hath justly been styled our English Justinian. For in his time the law did receive so sudden a perfection, that Sir Matthew Hale does not scruple to

(1) The following is the celebrated 29th chapter of Magna Charta, the foundation of the liberty of Englishmen: "Nullus liber homo capiatur, vel imprisonetur, aut disseisiatur de libero tenemento suo, vel libertatibus vel liberis consuetudinibus suis, aut utlagetur, aut exulet, aut aliquo modo

destruatur; nec super eum ibimus, nec super eum mittemus, nisi per legale judicium parium suorum, vel per legem terræ. Nulli vendemus, nulli negabimus, aut differemus rectum vel justitiam."

(m) Hale, Hist. C. L. 156.

[affirm (n), that more was done in the first thirteen years of his reign, to settle and establish the distributive justice of the kingdom, than in all the ages since that time put together.

gave

It would be endless to enumerate all the particulars of these regulations; but the principal may be reduced under the following general heads. 1. He established, confirmed and settled the great charter and charter of forests. 2. He a mortal wound to the encroachments of the pope and his clergy, by limiting and establishing the bounds of ecclesiastical jurisdiction; and by obliging the ordinary, to whom all the goods of intestates at that time belonged, to discharge the debts of the deceased. 3. He defined the limits of the several temporal courts of the highest jurisdiction, those of the king's bench, common pleas, and exchequer, so as they might not interfere with each other's proper business; to do which they were afterwards obliged to have recourse to fictions. 4. He settled the boundaries of the inferior courts in counties, hundreds, and manors, confining them to causes of no great amount, according to their primitive institution; though of considerably greater than, by the alteration of the value of money, they were afterwards permitted to determine. 5. He secured the property of the subject, by abolishing all arbitrary taxes and talliages levied without consent of the national council. 6. He guarded the common justice of the kingdom from abuses, by giving up the royal prerogative of sending mandates to interfere in private causes. 7. He settled the form, solemnities, and effect of fines levied in the Court of Common Pleas, though the thing itself was of Saxon original. 8. He first established a repository for the public records of the kingdom, few of which are more antient than the reign of his father, and those were by him collected. 9. He improved upon the laws of King Alfred, by that great and orderly method of watch and ward for preserving the public peace and (n) Hale, Hist. C. L. 158.

[preventing robberies, established by the statute of Winchester. He settled and reformed many abuses incident to tenures, and removed some restraints on the alienation of landed property, by the statute of quia emptores. 11. He instituted a speedier way for the recovery of debts, by granting execution not only upon goods and chattels, but also upon lands, by writ of elegit; which was of signal benefit to a trading people; and, upon the same commercial ideas, he also allowed the charging of lands in a statute merchant, to pay debts contracted in trade,-contrary to all feudal principles. 12. He effectually provided for the recovery of advowsons, as temporal rights; in which, before, the law was extremely deficient. 13. He also effectually closed the great gulph in which all the landed property of the kingdom was in danger of being swallowed, by his reiterated statutes of mortmain; most admirably adapted to meet the frauds that had then been devised, though afterwards contrived to be evaded by the invention of uses. 14. He established a new limitation of property by the creation of estates tail: concerning the good policy of which, however,] in the strict shape at least that originally belonged to them, [modern times have entertained a very different opinion. 15. He reduced all Wales to the subjection not only of the Crown, but, in great measure, of the laws of England]-an improvement which has been since thoroughly completed; [and he seems to have entertained a design of doing the like by Scotland, so as to have formed an entire and complete union of the island of Great Britain.

This catalogue might be continued much further: but, upon the whole, we may observe, that the very scheme and model of the administration of common justice between party and party was entirely settled by this king (p); and has continued nearly the same, in all succeeding ages, to this day: abating some few alterations, which the humour or necessity of subsequent times hath occasioned. The

(p) Hale, Hist. C. L. 162.