but in any case it would be misleading to speak of anyone having a right to attend. On the contrary, for many centuries attendance at assemblies and Parliaments was a burden rather than a privilege, and people considered themselves lucky if they could obtain the royal privilege of not being summoned to Parliaments. The national assembly, therefore, was not a body of fixed composition or definite powers. Sometimes it seems hardly larger than the household itself, while at others we find a very imposing array of nobles and prelates.
THE RESULT OF THE CONQUEST
It is after the Norman Conquest that these institutions take a more definite form. The household continues to be the real political centre, and beside it, or perhaps within it, there develops a small council consisting of clerks and minor officials who are continually at hand for the transaction of daily business. The national assembly, on the other hand, begins to take a different complexion. It was one of the main features of feudalism that a lord could demand counsel from his tenants, and that those tenants were legally bound to attend their lord upon demand and to sit as a court in order to give him advice, to pass legal judgment upon fellow tenants, and to grant financial and moral support to the lord. The old national assembly therefore became a court with comparatively definite powers, and a well-defined obligation of attendance. For the time being it is true that its business was principally what we may describe as feudal. But in the eleventh and twelfth centuries feudal matters were of first-rate importance. Feudal custom regulated the position of the Crown with respect to the great nobles, and therefore supplied the place of a body of public law. The King’s Court, therefore, is not merely the Anglo-Saxon consultative assembly, but also a body entrusted with the power of applying such constitutional law as then existed.
It was also a peculiarity of feudalism that these matters of public law—the prerogative of the Crown, the rights and duties of the baronage, the means of extraordinary taxation and so on—were intimately connected with land. From this it resulted, first, that the King’s Court had to pay special attention to the law of land upon which these public rights and duties were based, and secondly, that these matters of essentially public law came to be regarded from the point of view of private property law. Political rights and privileges, the powers of particular officers and the like were treated as if they were land—or at least incorporeal hereditaments, which mediaeval law hardly distinguished from land. In this way there grew up the habit of regarding political and constitutional rights as sharing the specially sacred character of private property. As long as the common law controlled political thought, this attitude of mind persisted. No doubt there were grave disadvantages in the feudal view which treated governmental powers as private property—for one thing, they were apt to be regarded as private resources to be exploited to the limit; yet, on the other hand, the English constitution and the common law itself owed a good deal of their stability and continuity to the fact that all the sanctity which attached to private property could be invoked to protect the liberty of the subject. It is only when the modern theory of the State appears after the Reformation and the Renaissance that this point of view is theoretically attacked. This does not mean to say, of course, that the Crown never violated the rights of private liberty and property; as we shall see, more than once encroachments were made upon privileges which were the property rights of local magnates. Nevertheless, the theory was universally admitted, and in times of stress played an important rôle. As late as the fifteenth century many important questions of public law, such as the relations of Crown and Parliament, the theory of taxation, and so on, were discussed entirely from the point of view of a real property lawyer.1 All this, therefore, was the direct result of the feudal character of the King’s Court as it appears after the Conquest.
THE MEANING OF THE WORD “COURT”
Before we discuss further the character and development of the King’s Court (which historians usually refer to by its old Latin style of the Curia Regis) it may be well to examine the various meanings of the word “court” or “curia”. The original sense of the word is the rectangular open space around which the mediaeval house was built; the usual plan was that of a hollow square of buildings, the inside space of which was called the court. The colleges at Oxford and Cambridge are all built upon this plan, which was originally that of the ordinary dwelling-house, and in Cambridge their interior spaces are still called courts. The next development is to extend the word “court” to the house itself, and many famous houses in England are still called courts—Hampton Court, for example. Then the word “court” can also be used of the household and personal attendants of a king or great noble. Upon certain festivals during the year kings and nobles were accustomed to gather around them a particularly large company, and this event, too, becomes known as a court; the word will serve furthermore to designate the persons who were present on such an occasion. At Christmas and Easter the Anglo-Norman kings held courts of this character. The word was also applied to those assemblies at which attendance was compulsory as a feudal duty, and thence by a natural transition to any assembly for the purpose of transacting important public business; the Bank of England is governed by a court, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by a General Court. Finally, the word “court” is particularly used of such assemblies when they are engaged in judicial business. In mediaeval usage the word “court” may bear any of these different meanings singly or in combination, and if mediaeval institutions are to be understood properly it must be remembered that a court might be at the same time legislative, judicial, deliberative, and even festive.
It was all the more easy to combine these different functions in one body because early courts were very different from modern ones. The central figure of a court to-day is the judge, but, as we shall see later,1 it required some time before English law developed this office. Feudal courts seem generally to have consisted not of judges but of a number of “suitors” with whom rested the decision. The lord of the court indeed presided in person or more usually by his steward, but the president was in no sense a judge as the word is understood to-day. Under the Norman kings, we have descriptions of trials where it plainly appears that the king himself demanded of his barons in the court to pronounce a judgment.2 His lords, as we have seen, had courts of their own. Like the royal courts, these seignorial courts could sometimes take a political appearance, and from time to time we find lords holding assemblies of tenants like little parliaments in order to obtain grants of money.3 The House of Lords when sitting as a criminal court preserved, at least in theory, this old conception of a court of many suitors who are judges, irrespective of their being professional lawyers, and exactly reproduced an old feudal court of barons who are judges, while the presiding officer (the steward of the lord—in this case the King’s Lord High Steward) is merely chairman.4
THE ANGLO-NORMAN CURIA REGIS
The court of the Anglo-Norman kings consisted, therefore, of the Anglo-Saxon Witan, which was essentially deliberative in character, radically transformed by the infusion of Norman ideas. There is a long and somewhat fruitless discussion as to whether the Norman Curia Regis is or is not the same institution as the Anglo-Saxon Witan; in this form the question can hardly be answered. It seems rather to have been the fact that the formless and indefinite Witan was so thoroughly transformed by the Norman kings that it is purely a matter of fancy whether one describes the product as a new institution or as a modification of the old one.
There are cases to be found where the Witan, under the Anglo-Saxon kings, exercised quasi-judicial functions; it is perfectly clear, however, that the Witan did not entertain the ambition of becoming a national court. The whole spirit of Anglo-Saxon law made for the maintenance of local institutions, and more than once we find laws prohibiting parties to appeal to the King unless there has been a grave default of justice in the regular courts. When judicial matters do appear before the King and the Witan they are apt to be treated as political disputes requiring a political solution by negotiation, compromise, and royal mediation rather than a strictly judicial treatment. With the Norman Conquest we begin to find the transformation of the deliberative Witan into the judicial court. The transformation was, of course, slow, and even after the conquest there are proceedings
