370 History of the English Landed Interest. 



increase in tliese kinds of oflPences, but the enlianced value with 

 which landed property had come to be regarded. 



And here let us turn aside to seek a further possible cause 

 for that confusion in modern minds resjoecting mediaeval courts 

 to which we have alluded in an earlier chapter. It was pointed 

 out that the Court Leet appeared to have been held in the 

 same place and under the same presidency as the Manor Court. 

 It is now no impossible suggestion that it was also held at the 

 same time. This would tend to still further confuse the minds 

 of modern theorists, whose evidence is principally the results 

 of a careful examination of the early Court Rolls. It will be 

 remembered that the solution of the difficulty put forward by 

 us was, that both kinds of assembly, though held at the same 

 court, presided over by the same person, and (as it is now still 

 further suggested) for some time at least fixed on the same 

 day and hour, were after all kept distinct by a variation of 

 their formalities which could deceive no one attending them. 

 It is quite possible that, at an early stage of the national his- 

 tory, the business items of both courts were so trivial as to be 

 quite capable of transaction in one day, and therefore that, for 

 the sake of convenience, a tacit if not formal consent was given 

 to such a practice. If, then, on a similar plea of convenience, 

 the court scribe entered both sets of transactions on the same 

 roll, the mystification of the modern antiquarian becomes 

 natural and at the same time explicable.^ 



But at the period under discussion, so imperceptibly but 

 surely had both courts drifted apart, that the business of the 

 one in no way corresponded to or interfered with that of the 

 other. Bit by bit their jurisdiction in more important matters 

 had been relegated to the assizes, so that in the reign of 

 Charles II., though the charters granting the pit and gallows 

 had never been formally revoked, the Countess of Derby was 

 heavily fined for the execution of William Christian.- Gradu- 

 ally had offences against the commonwealth been relegated from 



' The reader shovild study chapter iv. of Rogers, FriccH and Agric, to 

 see not only the variability but the extent of the justice transacted in the 

 medieeval courts. 



'' Id., Ibid. 



