Читать книгу Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John. With an Historical Introduction онлайн

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(c) Special procedure for determining pleas of disputed titles to land or rights of possession was also invented by Henry to take the place of the ancient method of trial by battle. These Assizes, as they were called, are fully discussed elsewhere.^[156] The Grand Assize was looked on with suspicion by the barons as a procedure competent only before the royal courts, and therefore closely bound up with the King’s other devices for substituting his own jurisdiction for that of the private courts. The petty assizes, on the contrary, met with a ready acceptance, and the barons in 1215, far from objecting to their continuance, demanded that they should be held in regular sessions four times a year in each county of England.

These were the chief innovations which enabled Henry, while instituting many reforms urgently required and gladly welcomed by the mass of his subjects, at the same time to effect a revolution in the relations of royal justice to feudal justice. As time went on, new royal writs and remedies were being continually devised to meet new types of cases; and litigants flocked more and more readily to the King’s Courts, leaving the seignorial courts empty of business and of fees. Nor was this the only grievance of the barons. When one of their own number was amerced or accused of any offence involving loss of liberty or lands, he might be compelled by the Crown, under Henry and his sons, to submit to have the amercement assessed or the criminal proceedings conducted by one of the new Benches (by a tribunal composed of some four or five of the King’s officials), in place of the time-honoured judgment of his peers assembled in the Commune Concilium (the predecessor of the modern Parliament).