The sheriff delivered the jails.  When he arrived at a town in his province, he had the right of summary trial of the prisoners, of which he might cause either their release or the execution.  This was called a jail delivery.  The sheriff presented bills of indictment to the twenty-four members of the grand jury.  If they approved, they wrote above, billa vera; if the contrary, they wrote ignoramus.  In the latter case the accusation was annulled, and the sheriff had the privilege of tearing up the bill.  If during the deliberation a juror died, this legally acquitted the prisoner and made him innocent, and the sheriff, who had the privilege of arresting the accused, had also that of setting him at liberty.

That which made the sheriff singularly feared and respected was that he had the charge of executing all the orders of her Majesty—­a fearful latitude.  An arbitrary power lodges in such commissions.

The officers termed vergers, the coroners making part of the sheriff’s cortege, and the clerks of the market as escort, with gentlemen on horseback and their servants in livery, made a handsome suite.  The sheriff, says Chamberlayne, is the “life of justice, of law, and of the country.”

In England an insensible demolition constantly pulverizes and dissevers laws and customs.  You must understand in our day that neither the sheriff, the wapentake, nor the justice of the quorum could exercise their functions as they did then.  There was in the England of the past a certain confusion of powers, whose ill-defined attributes resulted in their overstepping their real bounds at times—­a thing which would be impossible in the present day.  The usurpation of power by police and justices has ceased.  We believe that even the word “wapentake” has changed its meaning.  It implied a magisterial function; now it signifies a territorial division:  it specified the centurion; it now specifies the hundred (centum).

Moreover, in those days the sheriff of the county combined with something more and something less, and condensed in his own authority, which was at once royal and municipal, the two magistrates formerly called in France the civil lieutenant of Paris and the lieutenant of police.  The civil lieutenant of Paris, Monsieur, is pretty well described in an old police note:  “The civil lieutenant has no dislike to domestic quarrels, because he always has the pickings” (22nd July 1704).  As to the lieutenant of police, he was a redoubtable person, multiple and vague.  The best personification of him was Rene d’Argenson, who, as was said by Saint-Simon, displayed in his face the three judges of hell united.

The three judges of hell sat, as has already been seen, at Bishopsgate, London.

CHAPTER VII.

SHUDDERING.