The most important of these was the Shire Court.  It still retained its old constitution; it preserved some tradition of a tribunal where the king was not the sole fountain of justice, and the memory of a law which was not the “king’s law.”  It administered the old customary English codes, and carried on its business by the old procedure.  There came to it the lords of the manors with their stewards, the abbots and priors of the county with their officers, the legal men of the hundreds who were qualified by holding property or by social freedom, and from every township the parish priest, with the reeve and four men, the smiths, farmers, millers, carpenters, who had been chosen in the little community to represent their neighbours; and along with them stood the pledges, the witnesses, the finders of dead bodies, men suspected of crime.  The court was, in fact, a great public meeting of the whole county; there was no rank or order which did not send some of its number to swell the confused crowd that stood round the sheriff.  The criminal was generally put on his trial by accusation of an injured neighbour, who, accompanied by his friends, swore that he did not bring his charge for hatred, or for envy, or for unlawful lust of gain.  The defendant claimed the testimony of his lord, and further proved his innocence by a simple or threefold compurgation—­that is, by the oath of a certain number of freemen among his neighbours, whose property gave them the required value in the eye of the law, and who swore together as “compurgators” that they believed his oath of denial to be “clean and unperjured.”  The faith of the compurgator was measured by his landed property, and the value of the joint-oath which was required depended on a most intricate and baffling set of arithmetical calculations, and differed according to the kind of crime, the rank of the criminal, and the amount of property which was in dispute, besides other differences dependent on local customs.  Witnesses might also be called from among neighbours who held property and were acquainted with the facts to which they would “dare” to swear.  The final judgment was given by acclamation of the “suitors” of the court—­that is, by the owners of property and the elected men of the hundreds or townships; in other words, by the public opinion of the neighbourhood.  If the accused man were of bad character by common report, or if he could find no friends to swear in his behalf, “the oath burst,” and there remained for him only the ordeal or trial by battle, which he might accept or refuse at his own peril.  In the simple ordeal he dipped his hand in boiling water to the wrist, or carried a bar of redhot iron three paces.  If in consequence of his lord’s testimony being against him the triple ordeal was used, he had to plunge his arm in water up to the elbow, or to carry the iron for nine paces.  If he were condemned to the ordeal by water, his death seems to have been certain, since sinking was the sign of innocence, and if the prisoner