These different codes of law were administered in various courts of divers origins.  The tenant-in-chief of the king who was rich enough had his cause carried to the King’s Court of barons, where he was tried by his peers.  The poorer vassals, with the mass of the people, sought such justice as was to be had in the old English courts, the Shire Court held by the sheriff, and, where this survived, the Hundred Court summoned by the bailiff.  The lowest orders of the peasant class, shut out from the royal courts, could only plead in questions of property in the manor courts of their lords.  The governing bodies of the richer towns were winning the right to exercise absolute jurisdiction over the burghers within their own walls.  The Forest courts were held by royal officers, who were themselves exempt from all jurisdiction save that of the king.  And under one plea or another all men in the State were liable for certain causes to be brought under the jurisdiction of the newly established Church courts.  This system of conflicting laws was an endless source of perplexity.  The country was moreover divided into two nationalities, who imperfectly understood one another’s customary rights; and it was further broken into various classes which stood in different relations to the law.  Those who had sufficient property were not only deemed entirely trustworthy themselves, but were also considered answerable for the men under them; a second class of freeholders held property sufficient to serve as security for their own good behaviour, but not sufficient to make them pledges for others; there was a third and lower class without property, for whose good conduct the law required the pledge of some superior.  In a state of things so complicated, so uncertain and so shifting, it is hard to understand how justice can ever have been secured; nor, indeed, could any general order have been preserved, save for the fact that these early courts of law, having all sprung out of the same conditions of primitive life, and being all more or less influenced and so brought to some common likeness by the Roman law, did not differ very materially in their view of the relations between the subjects of the State, and fundamentally administered the same justice.  Until this time too there had been but little legal business to bring before the courts.  There was practically no commerce; there was little sale of land; questions of property were defined within very narrow limits; a mass of contracts, bills of exchange, and all the complicated transactions which trade brings with it, were only beginning to be known.  As soon, however, as industry developed, and the needs of a growing society made themselves felt, the imperfections of the old order became intolerable.  The rude methods and savage punishments of the law grew more and more burdensome as the number of trials increased; and the popular courts were found to be fast breaking down under the weight of their own ignorance and inefficiency.