alive.  Tales of Robin Hood began to take shape.  The by-ways and thickets were peopled with men, innocent or guilty, but all alike desperate.  One Richard, we read, whose fellow at the plough fell dead in an epileptic fit, fled in terror of the judges to the woods, and so did many a worse man than Richard.  We find constantly the same tale of the sudden quarrel, the blow with a stick or a stone, the thrust with the knife which every man carried, the stroke with a hatchet.  Then the slayer in his panic flies to a nun’s garden, to a monastery, or to the shelter of a church, where the men of the village keep guard over him till knights of the shire are sent from the Court, to whom he confesses his crime, and who allow him so many days to fly to the nearest port and forsake the kingdom.  Perhaps he never reaches the coast, but takes to the woods, already haunted by “abjurors” like himself, or by outlaws flying from justice.  In the social conditions of the England of that day the administration of justice was, in more ways than one, a very critical matter, and the efforts of over-zealous judges and sheriffs might easily end in driving the people to desperation before the severity of the law, or in crushing out under a heedless taxation a prosperity which was still new and still rare.

Henry perhaps already saw the deep current of discontent which only a year later was to break out in the most terrible rebellion of his reign.  In any case the severity of the measures which he took shows how serious he thought the crisis.  After his landing in March 1170 one month was given to inquiry as to the state of the country.  In the beginning of April he held a council to consider the reform of justice.  A commission was appointed to examine, during the next two months, every freeholder throughout the kingdom as to the conduct of judges and sheriffs and every other officer charged with the duty of collecting or accounting for the public money.  Its members were chosen from among the most zealous opponents of the Court officials-the great barons, the priors, the important abbots of the shires—­and they were all men who had no connection with the Exchequer or the Curia Regis.  Their work was done, and their report presented within the time allowed; but the king, practical, businesslike, impatient of abuses, like every vigorous autocratic ruler, had no mind to wait two months to redress the grievances of his people.  The barons who had been appointed as sheriffs at the opening of his reign had governed after the old corrupt traditions, or perhaps themselves suffering under the ruthless pressure of the barons of the Exchequer, had been driven to a like severity of extortion.  By an edict of the king every sheriff throughout the country was struck from his post; of the twenty-seven only seven were restored to their places, and new sheriffs were appointed, all of whom save four were officers of the King’s Court.  The great local noble who had lorded it as he chose over the