When we get to the Conquest the hundred is treated by the Norman administrators as the most convenient of the smaller units of government. The Dialogue of the Exchequer tells us2 of the rule long observed in that court as a result of the numerous assassinations of Normans, presumably by Englishmen. In order to check this it was ordained that every hundred wherein a Norman was found slain by an unknown hand should be liable to a very heavy murder fine. As time went on the hundred was allowed to relieve itself of the fine by proving that the dead man was not a Norman but an Englishman, but in the end the races had become so mingled that it was impossible to maintain this procedure of “presentment of Englishry” and the murder fine was abolished by Edward III. The principle of making the hundred liable in respect of undetected crimes was not abandoned, however, and the Statute of Winchester (1285) lays down a general rule that the whole of the hundred where a robbery was done shall be answerable for it unless they can produce the offender.3 For the next five hundred years Parliament constantly increased the civil liability of the hundred for crimes committed within its borders, especially by rioters, until in 1827 a long list of such statutes was repealed,4 and the hundred’s liability was restricted to damage done by rioters;5 later still the burden was placed on the county or borough rate-payers by the Riot (Damages) Act, 1886.
All this will serve to illustrate the varied aspects of mediaeval institutions, for besides this police and administrative side of the hundred, its judicial powers continued, although their decline came rather earlier. By the Assize of Clarendon (1166)6 it had been ordained that in every county and in every hundred the twelve most lawful men of each hundred and the four most lawful men of each vill should be sworn to present any man who was suspected of serious crime either to the King’s Justice or to the sheriff. If the hundred or the vill had been successful in capturing a suspect, they were to deliver him over, accompanied by two lawful men “to bear the record of the county or the hundred”—in other words to state verbally the circumstances under which the prisoner was captured. In 1234 a royal ordinance1 declared that hundred courts had been held too frequently and that rich and poor had been equally oppressed thereby; it was therefore ordained that they should meet every three weeks instead of once a fortnight as heretofore—it may be observed in passing that this is not the only complaint we hear during the middle ages of too many courts and too much justice; earlier still Henry II admitted that the country had suffered grievously “by reason of the multitude of justices, for they were eighteen in number”, reducing their number to five (1178).2
THE LATER HUNDRED
The hundred court (or, as it was more usually called, “the hundred” simply) was under the presidency of an official called the hundred man or the reeve, but his importance rapidly declined, for the hundred lost the independence which it seems to have had originally. On the one hand, many hundreds fell into the power of the sheriffs, and when the sheriffs in turn have been subjected to the Crown, those hundreds will become the king’s hundreds. In the Norman period sheriffs frequently purchased their counties, and sublet the hundreds—a sure way of encouraging extortion. On the other hand, many hundreds fell into the hands of neighbouring landowners either by royal grants of varying extent, by purchase from the sheriffs, or by usurpation. By the reign of Edward I more than half were in private hands.3 As in all the communal courts, the judgment proceeded from the whole body of people who constituted the court, and in the case of the hundred these people (“suitors” as they were called) seem to have been usually quite small landowners, and it soon became the practice for the obligation of attending the court to be restricted to the owners of particular pieces of land—another peculiarity which is common in the middle ages.
THE SHERIFF’S TOURN: COURTS LEET
We have already mentioned the success of the sheriff in securing control over the hundred by appointing one of his underlings as bailiff of it; his influence was further increased by means of the “sheriff’s tourn”. Twice a year every hundred held an especially full meeting which was attended by the sheriff or his deputy, at which there came to meet him the reeve and the four best men of each vill in the hundred to undergo a searching examination at his hands. They had to lay before him their suspicions upon the members of their community; those suspected of grave matters were arrested by the sheriff and held for the King’s Justice, while less serious offenders were amerced by the sheriff. For the purposes of these specially important meetings twelve freeholders were appointed to revise the presentments by the vills.1 Upon the occasion of the sheriff’s tourn a thorough investigation was always made of the condition of the frankpledges, of which we shall speak later. By the close of the middle ages the hundred was reduced to insignificance, and the tourn lost its powers to the Justices of the Peace.2 Those hundreds which fell into private hands lasted longer, for their profits were sufficient to interest their owners, especially those who had the valued privilege of holding “courts leet” to replace the sheriff’s tourn. We shall return to the leet in the following chapter when dealing with seignorial jurisdictions.
THE COUNTY COURT
We now come to the county court, or “county” as it was more simply called, for it must be remembered that in the early Norman period administration and adjudication were still not separated, and there was hardly need for the word “court”—even when the word does occur it does not necessarily bear the modern meaning of an organ of justice. The shire is the most ancient of English institutions. Many of the individual counties are directly descended from the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of the age when the land was divided into numerous petty realms. In such cases as this the shire moot was the direct representative of the national assembly of a once independent kingdom, and for a time was presided over by an alderman, who was sometimes a member of the ancient royal family. It seems that some other counties, however, are of later origin and were deliberately erected as units of provincial government in imitation of the place which the ancient county now occupied in a united England. The history of the county falls into two periods; in the first the Crown is endeavouring to secure complete control over the county organisation; in the second, that control having been acquired, we see the steady decline of the county in practical importance.3 The original jurisdiction of the county was once limitless both in kind and in degree. The county was the greater and more solemn body, but it was not “superior” to the hundred in the modern sense of the word: decisions of the hundred, for example, were not subject to review in the county, and the county, like the hundred, was a court of first instance. In Anglo-Saxon times the shire-moot was an impressive assembly of all the greatest people of the shire who met in order to transact all the functions of government. There are surviving charters which testify to the fact that some of that business was judicial, but both before and after the conquest all sorts of administrative duties were performed in the shire or county, as well as those more distinctly judicial functions which entitle it to be described as a court.1
The county came to exercise two jurisdictions, and the method appropriate to each is well worth study, for it illustrates the difference between ancient courts and modern ones.
THE SUITORS IN THE COUNTY COURT
Taking first the more ancient aspect of the county, we find that its constitution and procedure resembled those of the hundred and other ancient courts both in England and on the continent. According to the classical theory,