no appeal; it was orderly, methodical, unrelenting; it was backed by the whole force of the kingdom; it overlooked nothing; it forgot nothing; it was comparatively incorruptible.  The lesser courts, with their old clumsy procedure, were at a hopeless disadvantage before the professional judges, who could use all the new legal methods.  If a man suffered under these there was none to plead his cause, for in all the country there was not a single trained lawyer save those in the king’s service.  However we who look back from the safe distance of seven hundred years may see with clearer vision the great work which was done by Henry’s Assize, in its own day it was far from being a welcome institution to our unhappy forefathers.  There was scarcely a class in the country which did not find itself aggrieved as the king waged war with the claims of “privilege” to stand above right and justice and truth.  But all resistance of turbulent and discontented factions was vain.  The great justiciars at the head of the legal administration, De Lucy and Glanville, steadily carried out the new code, and a body of lawyers was trained under them which formed a class wholly unknown elsewhere in Europe.  Instead of arbitrary and inflicting decisions, varying in every hundred and every franchise according to the fashion of the district, the judges of the Exchequer or Curia Regis declared judgments which were governed by certain general principles.  The traditions of the great administrators of Henry’s Court were handed down through the troubled reigns of his sons; and the whole of the later Common law is practically based on the decisions of two judges whose work was finished within fifty years of Henry’s death, and whose labours formed the materials from which in 1260 Bracton drew up the greatest work ever written on English law.

There was, in fact, in all Christendom no such system of government or of justice as that which Henry’s reforms built up.  The king became the fountain of law in a way till then unknown.  The later jealousy of the royal power which grew up with the advance of industrial activity, with the growth of public opinion and of its means of expressing itself, with the development of national experience and national self-dependence, had no place in Henry’s days, and had indeed no reason for existence.  The strife for the abolition of privileges which in the nineteenth century was waged by the people was in the twelfth century waged by the Crown.  In that time, if in no other, the assertion of the supreme authority of the king meant the assertion of the supreme authority of a common law; and there was, in fact, no country in Europe where the whole body of the baronage and of the clergy was so early and so completely brought into bondage to the law of the land.  Since all courts were royal courts, since all law was royal law, since no justice was known but his, and its conduct lay wholly in the hands of his trained servants, there was no reason for the king to look with jealousy on