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Indiana University Studies 
and shire-reeve in the county court. William I allowed the 
clergy a separate jurisdiction, and no fewer than seven kinds 
of Ecclesiastical Courts arose. The lowest of these was the 
Archdeacon’s Court. An appeal lay from this to the Con- 
sistory Court of the bishop of the diocese which also had some 
concurrent jurisdiction. The Court of Peculiars was another 
court of original jurisdiction over parishes in the province of 
Canterbury. The Prerogative Courts of Canterbury and York 
and the Court of Arches were appellate courts, and Henry 
VIII established another appellate court called Court of Dele- 
gates. An appeal lay to the Pope down to the time of Henry 
VIII, altho the Constitutions of Clarendon undertook to take 
this away. The Ecclesiastical Courts had jurisdiction over 
all ecclesiastical matters, like heresy, schism, and validity of 
holy orders ; over matters of marriage, legitimacy, divorce, 
wills of personalty, and granting of letters of administration ; 
and over all cases, whether civil or criminal, where one of 
the parties was a clerk. The law applied by the Ecclesi- 
astical Courts was canon law, and the procedure followed was 
canon law procedure. The law of wills, marriage, and divorce 
is therefore of canon law origin. Henry II tried to get con- 
trol of church courts (in the Constitutions of Clarendon), 
but in the end he failed. 
The courts of the last part of the Archaic Period, there- 
fore, were the Anglo-Saxon local courts of the county and 
hundred; and the Court Baron of the manor (which took the 
place of the court of the Anglo-Saxon thegns) ; the Law Mer- 
chants’ Courts; the Ecclesiastical Courts; and the King’s 
Courts. This was an elaborate system of courts as compared 
with what the Anglo-Saxons had had. 
Legal Procedure, Yet great as was the work which the 
Normans and the first Plantagenets did for the organization 
of courts and for substantive law, both antecedent and reme- 
dial, their greatest work was in the field of procedure. 
Writs. The first step in legal procedure in the king’s courts 
(except in cases tried by the assize) was by writ. This inno- 
vation was introduced on the establishment of the Curia Regis. 
In Anglo-Saxon days the plaintiff simply made a verbal com- 
plaint to the sheriff, or hundred reeve, or other local judge. 
But when cases ; had to be taken up to a central court the 
situation was different. The king’s justices had to depend 
