were to be made or repaired with wood from the king’s or the nearest landowner’s domains; no man might entertain a stranger for whom he would not be answerable before the justices; the old English law was again repeated in the very words of ancient times, that none might take into his house a waif or wanderer for more than one night unless he or his horse were sick; and if he tarried longer he must be kept until he were redeemed by his lord or could give safe pledges; no religious house might receive any of the mean people into their body without good testimony as to character unless he were sick unto death; and heretics were to be treated as outlaws.  These last indeed were not very plentiful in England, and the over-anxious legislators seem only to have had in view a little band of German preachers, who had converted one woman, and who had themselves at a late council at Oxford been branded, flogged, and driven out half-naked, so that there was by this time probably not one who had not perished in the cold.

Such was the series of regulations that opened the long course of reforms by which English law has been built up.  Two judges were sent during the next spring and summer through the whole of England.  The following year there was a survey of the forests, and in 1168 another circuit of the shires was made by the barons of the Exchequer.  Year by year with unbroken regularity the terrible visitation of the country by the justices went on.  The wealth of the luckless people poured into the king’s treasury; the busy secretaries recorded in the Rolls a mass of profits unknown to the accounts of earlier days.  The great barons who presided over the Shire courts found themselves practically robbed of power and influence.  The ordinary courts fell into insignificance beside those summoned by the king’s judges, thronged as they were with the crowd of rich and poor, trembling at the penalty of a ruinous fine for non-attendance or full of a newly-kindled hope of justice.  Important cases were more and more withdrawn from the sheriffs and given to the justices.  They entered the estates of the nobles, even the franchises, liberties, and manors which had been freed from the old courts of the shire or hundred; they reviewed their decisions and interfered with their judgments.  It is true that the system established in principle was but gradually carried into effect, and the people long suffered the tyranny of lords who maintained their own prisons.  Half a century later we find sturdy barons setting up their tumbrils and gallows.  In the reign of Edward I. there were still thirty-five private gallows in Berkshire alone, and when one of them was by chance or age broken down, and the people refused to set it up again, the baron could still make shift with the nearest oak.  But as a system of government, feudalism was doomed from the day of Henry’s Assize, and only dragged out a lingering existence till the legislation of Edward I. dealt it a final blow.