[Sidenote:  Judicial Reforms]

For four years all was quiet across the Welsh Marches, and Edward was able again to turn his attention to the work of internal reconstruction.  It is probably to this time, certainly to the earlier years of his reign, that we may attribute his modification of our judicial system.  The King’s Court was divided into three distinct tribunals, the Court of Exchequer which took cognizance of all causes in which the royal revenue was concerned; the Court of Common Pleas for suits between private persons; and the King’s Bench, which had jurisdiction in all matters that affected the sovereign as well as in “pleas of the crown” or criminal causes expressly reserved for his decision.  Each court was now provided with a distinct staff of judges.

Of yet greater importance than this change, which was in effect but the completion of a process of severance that had long been going on, was the establishment of an equitable jurisdiction side by side with that of the common law.  In his reform of 1178 Henry the Second broke up the older King’s Court, which had till then served as the final Court of Appeal, by the severance of the purely legal judges who had been gradually added to it from the general body of his councillors.  The judges thus severed from the Council retained the name and the ordinary jurisdiction of “the King’s Court,” but the mere fact of their severance changed in an essential way the character of the justice they dispensed.  The King in Council wielded a power which was not only judicial but executive; his decisions though based upon custom were not fettered by it, they wore the expressions of his will, and it was as his will that they were carried out by officers of the Crown.  But the separate bench of judges had no longer this unlimited power at their command.  They had not the king’s right as representative of the community to make the law for the redress of a wrong.  They professed simply to declare what the existing law was, even if it was insufficient for the full purpose of redress.  The authority of their decision rested mainly on their adhesion to ancient custom or as it was styled the “common law” which had grown up in the past.  They could enforce their decisions only by directions to an independent officer, the sheriff, and here again their right was soon rigidly bounded by set form and custom.  These bonds in fact became tighter every day, for their decisions were now beginning to be reported, and the cases decided by one bench of judges became authorities for their successors.  It is plain that such a state of things has the utmost value in many ways, whether in creating in men’s minds that impersonal notion of a sovereign law which exercises its imaginative force on human action, or in furnishing by the accumulation and sacredness of precedents a barrier against the invasion of arbitrary power.  But it threw a terrible obstacle in the way of the actual redress of wrong.  The increasing complexity of human action as civilization advanced outstripped the efforts of the law.  Sometimes ancient custom furnished no redress for a wrong which sprang from modern circumstances.  Sometimes the very pedantry and inflexibility of the law itself became in individual cases the highest injustice.