26 George E. Hozuard, 



so-called Heptarchic kingdoms, and these, in tlieir turn, were 

 consolidated into one empire, the prerogatives of the mon- 

 arch grew and his attributes expanded. By the tenth cen- 

 tury, he was not only the national landlord and the source of 

 honor, but the source of justice as well. The peace was the 

 king's peace, just as the old folk-land had become practically 

 terra regis. Nay, as if to make the personification consist- 

 ent, the national peace was spoken of indifferently as either 

 the frith or the viimd of the king.^ 



This new theory that the peace belonged to the king and 

 not to the people, had a curious and disastrous consequence. 

 After the Norman Conquest it was held by the lawyers that 

 the reign of law ceased with the death or deposition of the 

 sovereign. During each interregnum crime and violence and 

 all forms of anarchy ran riot and there was no power to pun- 

 ish. The king was dead and the law had died with him. 

 Edward I was the first monarch who reigned before he 

 was regularly crowned : and even in his case there was an 

 interregnum of four days. Not until many reigns later was 

 the doctrine that the king never dies fully established. ^ 



In England as elsewhere it was in the lower range of legal 

 procedure that the weakness of the royal authority was 

 longest revealed. This fact may be well illustrated by notic- 

 ing briefly a topic to which Sir Henry Maine has devoted two 

 of the most valuable chapters of his Early History of Institu- 

 tions^ — the law of pignoration or distress. The right of the 



1 Konrad Maurer, Krit. Ueh., Ill, 52. On the expansion of the Enghsh king- 

 dom and the rise of the king's peace, see Stubbs, Const. Hist., I, chaps. VI, VII; 

 Freeman, Nor man Conquest, I, 1-99; Camp. Pol., chap. IV; Green, The Con- 

 quest of England. Cf. Wilda, Strafrecht, 253-64, for the continental Germans; 

 and Leist, Alt-Arisches yus Getitium, 341-72, for the genesis and development 

 of the king's jurisdiction in India. 



2 Palgrave, Commonwealth, I, 284-5; Allen, Royal Prerogative, i^d, ff.; Stubbs, 

 Const. Hist., II, 103; Hearn, Aryan Household, 449. Is not the wardstaff, 

 which was annually sent from town to town and from manor to manor in ancient 

 Essex, as a symbol of the king's person and of the entrance of the peace, an 

 example of the tendency to incorporate abstract conceptions in concrete images? 

 For the "Tale of the Wardstaff," see Palgrave, Commomvealth, II, clvii-clxii. 



'^ Chaps. IX, X. 



260 



