The routine of this system of administration, as well as the mass of business to be done, effectually interfered with arbitrary action on the king’s part, and the regular and methodical work of the organized courts gave to the people a fair measure of protection against the tyranny or caprice of the sovereign.  But the royal power which was given over to justices and barons did not pass out of the hands of the king.  He was still in theory the fount of all authority and law, and could, whenever he chose, resume the powers that he had granted.  His control was never relaxed; and in later days we find that while judges on circuit who gave unjust judgment were summoned before the Curia Regis at Westminster, the judges of the Curia Regis itself were called for trial before the king himself in his council.

The reorganization of these courts was fast completed under Henry’s great justiciar, De Lucy, and the chancellor Thomas.  The next few years show an amount of work done in every department of government which is simply astonishing.  The clerks of the Exchequer took up the accounts and began once more regular entries in the Pipe Roll; plans of taxation were devised to fill the empty hoard, and to check the misery and tyranny under which the tax payers groaned.  The king ordered a new coinage which should establish a uniform system of money over the whole land.  As late as the reign of Henry I. the dues were paid in kind, and the sheriffs took their receipts for honey, fowls, eggs, corn, wax, wool, beer, oxen, dogs, or hawks.  When, by Henry’s orders, all payments were first made in coin to the Exchequer, the immediate convenience was great, but the state of the coinage made the change tell heavily against the crown.  It was impossible to adulterate dues in kind; it was easy to debase the coin when they were paid in money, and that money received by weight, whether it were coin from the royal mints, or the local coinages that had continued from the time of the early English kingdoms, or debased money from the private mints of the barons.  Roger of Salisbury, in fact, when placed at the head of the Exchequer, found a great difference between the weight and the actual value of the coin received.  He fell back on a simple expedient; in many places there had been a provision as old at least as Doomsday, which enacted that the money weighed out for town-geld should if needful be tested by re-melting.  The treasurer extended this to the whole system of the Exchequer.  He ordered that all money brought to the Exchequer should itself be tested, and the difference between its weight and real value paid by the sheriff who brought it.  The burden thus fell on the country, for the sheriff would of course protect himself as far as he could by exacting the same tests on all sums paid to him.  If the pound was worth but ten shillings in the market, no doubt the sheriff only took it for ten shillings in his court.  Practically each tax, each due, must have been at least doubled, and the sheriff himself was at the mercy of the Exchequer moneyers.  There was but one way to remedy the evil, by securing the purity of the coin, and twice during his reign Henry made this his special care.