CHAPTER I 



THE OLD LOCAL COURTS : COMMUNAL COURTS OF THE COUNTY 



AND OF THE HUNDRED; SEIGNORIAL COURTS, FEUDAL 



AND FRANCHISE; MUNICIPAL COURTS 



From the point of view of the administration of law, the 

 most striking phenomenon of the fourteenth and fifteenth 

 centuries is the development of the justices of the peace, and 

 the gradual transfer to these crown-appointed and crown- 

 controlled officials of all the more important powers of the 

 old local courts of the county, the hundred, and the manor.' 

 As part of the same movement of concentration in the hands 

 of the central government of control over questions form- 

 erly left to local authorities, must be regarded the short- 

 lived experiment of the establishment of a separate set of 

 crown-appointed officials for the regulation of economic mat- 

 ters. An account has already been given of the process by 

 which the justices of labourers were finally merged in the 

 justices of the peace and the enforcement of the economic 

 legislation became a permanent part of the duties of the 

 latter.^ The long transition period, lasting at least a hun- 

 dred and fifty years, during which the two series of courts, 

 quarter sessions and the old local courts, existed side by 

 side, must contain many instances of duplication of ma- 

 chinery and of conflict of jurisdiction, involving exactly 



1 Beard, Justice of the Peace, 16-17. The decay of the old local courts 

 included a decrease of the judicial and police functions of the sheriff; cf. 

 Medley, Eng. Cottst. Hist., 392-393- 



-Pt. I, ch. i, ss. I and 2. 



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