The Governments of Europe | Page 7

of the other, the Treasurer.
The principal officials within the two comprised a single body of men,
sitting now as justitiarii, or justices, and now as barones of the
Exchequer. The profits and costs of asserting and administering justice
and the incomings and outgoings of the Exchequer were but different
aspects of the same fundamental concerns of (p. 007) state.[7] The

justices of the Curia who held court on circuit throughout the realm and
the sheriffs who came up twice a year to render to the barons of the
Exchequer an account of the sums due from the shires served as the real
and tangible agencies through which the central and local governments
were knit together. As will appear, it was from the Norman Curia that,
in the course of time, there sprang immediately those diversified
departments of administration whose heads comprise the actual
executive of the British nation to-day.
[Footnote 7: Anson, Law and Custom of the Constitution, II., Pt. I., II.]
*8. King and Great Council.*--Untrammelled by constitutional
restrictions, the Conqueror and his earlier successors recognized such
limitations only upon the royal authority as were imposed by powerful
and turbulent subjects. Associated with the king, however, was from
the first a body known as the Commune Concilium, the Common, or
Great, Council. "Thrice a year," the Saxon Chronicle tells us, "King
William wore his crown every year he was in England; at Easter he
wore it at Winchester; at Pentecost, at Westminster; and at Christmas,
at Gloucester; and at these times all the men of England were with
him--archbishops, bishops and abbots, earls, thegns and knights." By
the phrase "all the men of England" is to be understood only the great
ecclesiastics, the principal officers of state, and the king's
tenants-in-chief--in truth, only such of the more important of these as
were summoned individually to the sovereign's presence. At least in
theory, however, the Norman kings were accustomed to consult this
gathering of magnates, very much as their predecessors had been
accustomed to consult the witenagemot, upon all important questions of
legislation, finance, and public policy. It may, indeed, be said that it is
the development of this Council that comprises the central subject of
English constitutional history; for, "out of it, directly or indirectly, by
one process or another, have been evolved Parliament, the Cabinet, and
the courts of law."[8]
[Footnote 8: W. Wilson, The State (rev. ed., Boston, 1903), 369.]
*9. The Plantagenet Monarchy.*--During the century and a half
following the death of the Conqueror the vigor of the monarchy varied

enormously, but not until the days of King John can there be said to
have been any loss of power or independence which amounted to more
than a passing circumstance. In a charter granted at the beginning of his
reign, in 1100, Henry I. confirmed the liberties of his subjects and
promised to respect the laws of Edward the Confessor; but the new
sovereign did not propose, and no one imagined that he intended to
propose, to relax any of the essential and legitimate power which had
been transmitted to him by his father and brother. The reign of (p. 008)
Stephen (1135-1154) was an epoch of anarchy happily unparalleled in
the history of the nation. During the course of it the royal authority
sank to its lowest ebb since the days of the Danish incursions. But the
able and wonderfully energetic Henry II. (1154-1189) recovered all that
had been lost and added not a little of his own account. "Henry II.," it
has been said, "found a nation wearied out with the miseries of anarchy,
and the nation found in Henry II. a king with a passion for
administration."[9] With the fundamental purpose of reducing all of his
subjects to equality before an identical system of law, the great
Plantagenet sovereign waged determined warfare upon both the
rebellious nobility and the independent clergy. He was not entirely
successful, especially in his conflict with the clergy; but he effectually
prevented a reversion of the nation to feudal chaos, and he invested the
king's law with a sanction which it had known hardly even in the days
of the Conqueror. The reign of Henry II. has been declared, indeed, to
"initiate the rule of law."[10] By reviving and placing upon a
permanent basis the provincial visitations of the royal justices, for both
judicial and fiscal purposes, and by extending in the local
administration of justice and finance the principle of the jury, Henry
contributed fundamentally to the development of the English Common
Law, the jury, and the modern hierarchy of courts. By appointing as
sheriffs lawyers or soldiers, rather than great barons, he fostered the
influence of the central government in local affairs. By commuting
military service for a money payment (scutage), and by a revival of the