This rich and flourishing community was a manor belonging to the Mosley family, who purchased the manorial rights in 1596 and continued to enjoy them until 1845, when the municipality (created in 1838) bought them for £200,000.
“The lord of the manor had the right to tax and toll all articles brought for sale into the market of the town. But, though the inhabitants were thus to a large extent taxed for the benefit of one individual, they had a far greater amount of local self-government than might have been supposed, and the court leet, which was then the governing body of the town, had, though in a rudimentary form, nearly all the powers now possessed by municipal corporations.”2
COUNTIES, PALATINATES, HONOURS
When we come to the county, however, we find that seignorial influence was less easy to assert. In one or two cases the office of sheriff became hereditary in a great family, but this advantage was soon destroyed by the strictness with which hereditary sheriffs, like all other sheriffs, had to account to the Exchequer. Even the appointment of an earl did not have the effect of putting the county into private hands; the county was still administered by a royal sheriff accountable to the Crown, the earl only receiving the third penny. A few counties became palatine, that is to say, exempt, or almost so, from royal jurisdiction (Chester, Lancaster and Durham); for this there were definite military reasons, as these border counties had to be kept almost continuously on a war footing as a defence against the Welsh and Scotch. The processes which we have seen at work in the township and the hundred, the Crown refused to tolerate in the county; and so the county became the basis of royal power in local government.
Generally speaking, therefore, private persons did not enjoy any jurisdiction higher than that of a hundred court with court leet. The result was inevitably to simplify the task of the Crown in effecting and maintaining the unity of the country, and, in the end, to facilitate the rise of the common law into its present position of complete and unrivalled primacy. At one moment, however, it seemed that things might have been otherwise. Even before the Conquest there were some very extensive private jurisdictions, and after the Conquest they continued to exist in a more feudalised form, very frequently being styled “Honours”. The honour was governed by a court which consisted of the barons who held land of it, and the procedure and jurisdiction of the court resembled closely that of the King’s own court. A few good examples1 of cases in honorial courts in the middle of the twelfth century show how important questions of property could be litigated, and sometimes settled by means of final concords, in the court of an honour without the necessity of invoking royal justice or its machinery.2
The decline of such jurisdictions is an important factor in our legal history. Some survived late because they were held by churches, but many vanished through escheat or forfeiture, or were broken up through descent to heiresses. There seems to have been little direct attack upon them at any date, though they must all have felt in time the competition of the royal courts with which they had concurrent jurisdiction principally in matters of real property.
We have therefore traced, very briefly, the characteristics of the old communal jurisdictions, together with their partial subjection to the growing forces of seignorial jurisdiction. The only place where these forces were checked was in the county, and their antagonist there was the Norman monarchy. We now come, therefore, to the consideration of the power of the Crown over the more ancient local jurisdictions.
THE CROWN AND LOCAL COURTS
SUMMARY
The unification of England by the Anglo-Saxon kings raised the problem of local institutions. It can hardly be said that they solved it, for throughout the Anglo-Saxon period government was local rather than royal—indeed, the idea of national institutions centring in the Crown is Norman rather than Anglo-Saxon.1
THE RISE OF THE SHERIFF
For all that, the Anglo-Saxon Crown did begin a policy of establishing connections with local institutions, and, as far as circumstances permitted, of exercising some sort of control over them. The shire or county, as we have said, frequently represented an ancient petty kingdom, and its titular head, the alderman, represented the ancient royal family. It is clear, therefore, that the alderman might be expected to uphold local institutions against any attempt at centralisation. This, in fact, seems to have been the case, and the situation was soon met by placing beside him a new official, the King’s reeve, who was answerable to the national King and not to the alderman. The duties of the king’s reeve seem to have been very miscellaneous, including both administration and judicial business.2 It was inevitable that as time went on the King’s reeve should grow in importance at the expense of the alderman, and that finally he should take the alderman’s place and become the principal officer of the shire under the name of “sheriff” or “shire reeve”. The complaints of his extortion and oppression are constant in the later Anglo-Saxon age, and it is clear that the Crown had some difficulty in maintaining control over its own sheriffs. After the Conquest there was a tendency to regard the English sheriff as the equivalent of the Norman vicomte and to develop the office upon those lines. The Norman kings steadily resisted this; they were strong enough to control even the very powerful sheriffs of the late eleventh century, and to use their local influence in the interest of the Crown. They therefore did not hesitate to appoint as sheriffs men of considerable importance. After a long period of political struggle, the Crown finally adopted the policy of limiting the sheriff’s tenure to one year, and of choosing him from the upper middle class of landowners.
The principal factor in controlling the sheriff was the annual accounting at the Exchequer. The severity of the exchequer’s dealings with sheriffs is a remarkable testimony to the power of the Crown, and observers noted with grim satisfaction that their local tyrant entered the exchequer, shaking in his shoes.1 Nor did a sheriff’s troubles cease with his term of office—or even at his death, for the exchequer process remorselessly pursued his heirs for arrears of his account.2 Such ruthlessness left the sheriff no alternative to amassing as big a surplus as possible in order to meet these contingencies. Unusual situations were met, however, by extraordinary means, and more than once large numbers of sheriffs were summarily deposed, while Henry II’s reign has left us some illuminating documents concerning his Inquest of Sheriffs—a general inquiry into the misdeeds of those officers.3 It is not an infrequent occurrence to find a wholesale removal from office of other ministers too, even judges—a famous example was when Edward I removed all the judges—for in the middle ages, as now, the enforcement of political morality was apt to be spasmodic rather than continuous. Into the political history of the sheriff’s office we cannot now enter.4 For our purpose the important aspects are the effect of these devices upon judicial institutions.
At the time of the Norman Conquest the sheriff, as the King’s representative, enjoyed a good deal of judicial power, which caused the Crown considerable anxiety, for there was no effective means of controlling him, except the somewhat desperate remedy of discharging him when popular unrest grew
