bribed with an ox, insisted on the ordeal of water, so that he should by no means escape.  Another month passed in the jail of Bedford before he was given up to be examined by the ordeal.  Whether he underwent it or whether he pleaded guilty when the judges met is uncertain, but however this might be, “he received the melancholy sentence of condemnation; and being taken to the place of punishment, his eyes were pulled out and he was mutilated, and his members were buried in the earth in the presence of a multitude of persons.”

Nor was there for the mass of the people any real help or security to be found in an appeal to the supreme tribunal of the realm where the king sat in council with his ministers.  This still remained a tribunal of exceptional resort to which appeals were rare.  There was one Richard Anesty, who, in these first years of Henry’s reign, desired to prove in the King’s Court his right to hold a certain property.  For five years Richard, his brother, and a multitude of helpers, were incessantly busied in this arduous task.  The court followed the king, and the king might be anywhere from York to the Garonne.  The unhappy suitor might well have joined in a complaint once made by a secretary of Henry in search of his master:  “Solomon saith there be three things difficult to be found out, and a fourth which may hardly be discovered:  the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a ship in the sea; the way of a serpent on the ground; and the way of a man in his youth.  I can add a fifth:  the way of a king in England.”  The whole business now done by post had then to be carried on by laborious journeyings, in which we hear again and again that horses died on the road; if a writ were needed from king or queen, if the royal seal were required, or a certificate from a bishop, or a letter from an archbishop, special messengers posted across country; then the writ must be carried in the same way to York, Lincoln, or elsewhere to be examined by some famous lawyer, sometimes an Italian learned in the last legal fashions of the day; perhaps it was pronounced faulty, or it might be that the seal of justiciar or archbishop was refused on its return from the lawyer, and the same business had to begin all over again; twice messengers had to be sent to Rome, the journey each way taking at least forty days of incessant and dangerous travelling.  When at last the appointed day for judgment by the justiciar came, friends, helpers, and witnesses had to be called together in the same laborious way, and transported at great cost to the place of trial, and there kept waiting till news was brought that the plea could not then be heard; and thus again and again the luckless suitor was summoned, each time to a different town in England.  In every town he was forced by his necessities to borrow money from some Jew, who demanded about eighty-seven per cent for the loan; and when at last, as Richard was worn out with the delays of justiciars, Henry appeared on the scene,