A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK 



The hundredal organization was the basis of all administration, judicial, 

 fiscal, and military. There was the county court, the hundred court, and 

 the court of the township, though this last was not strictly speaking judicial. 

 In Anglo-Saxon times the county court met twice a year and the hundred 

 court every three weeks. Under Henry II the latter was held every fort- 

 night, while in the thirteenth century it occurred every three weeks, and 

 the county court every month. Twice a year, however, came a specially 

 full hundred court, when the sheriff visited the hundred to see that the 

 tithings were full and that every man was in frank-pledge. At these the 

 reeve and four men of the vills attended. Attendance at these courts was a 

 duty attached to the land and as such irksome : such a man held such land on 

 condition that he attended so many courts in the year. The dwellers in the 

 county were identified with the land, and were collectively responsible for 

 crimes and miscarriages of justice committed within their marches. There 

 was the same idea underlying the hundred. If a man committed a murder 

 in Sampford or Babergh the whole hundred was responsible for the payment 

 of the fine of five marks. If a man fled from justice the hundred made good 

 his flight. The county and the court were one. In the shire the 

 courts were never called anything but the county, and the suitors were 

 the freeholders of the county. They ' were also the doomsmen, and no 

 foreigner could legally try a Suffolk man. In 133 1 2 the county complained 

 that owing to the dilapidated condition of Ipswich gaol Suffolk criminals 

 were lodged at Norwich, and were delivered by Norwich men. This was 

 against the law, for the men of Norfolk knew not the crimes of the men of 

 Suffolk. The principle of the administration of the county was Suffolk 

 men must transact Suffolk business, and no matter whether it were a hue and 

 ■cry, an inquisition post-mortem, an array, a grant to collect, it was done by 

 the landowners of the shire. 



The officers of the county were first the sheriff who presided at the county 

 court, while the bailiff of the king or the steward of the lord presided at the 

 court of the hundred. The earl had no official position beyond drawing the 

 third penny from the county revenue till the fourteenth century, when he prac- 

 tically became responsible for the military organization. The office of sheriff 

 became neither hereditary nor elective. His judicial powers were lessened 

 by the introduction of the Custodes Pacis, two or three knights empowered 

 to hear and determine felonies, who finally developed in the reign of 

 Edward III into the justices of the peace. In Tudor times the quarter- 

 sessions had superseded both the county and hundred courts, and were held at 

 Ipswich, Bury, Woodbridge, and Dunwich. Below the sheriff came the 

 coroners, four officers elected in the county court who kept the pleas of the 

 crown. These had to be resident in the county and possess certain property. 

 The king's fiscal and territorial interests were further looked after by the 

 escheator. The judicial interests of the crown in Suffolk were constantly 

 clashing with those of the great ecclesiastical liberties in which the king's 

 writ did not run. They removed fourteen hundreds from the royal juris- 

 diction, for the abbot of Bury claimed the right of the return of all writs in 

 Babergh, Risbridge, Thedwastry, Thingoe, Cosford, Lackford, and Black- 



1 Pollock and Maitland, Hist, of Engl. Law (1895), i, 550. 

 ' Cat. of Close 1330-3, p. 113. 



158 



