Читать книгу A Concise History of the Common Law - Theodore F. T. Plucknett - Страница 86

The hundred court (or, as it was more usually called, “the hundred” simply) was under the presidency of an official called the hundred man or the reeve, but his importance rapidly declined, for the hundred lost the independence which it seems to have had originally. On the one hand, many hundreds fell into the power of the sheriffs, and when the sheriffs in turn have been subjected to the Crown, those hundreds will become the king’s hundreds. In the Norman period sheriffs frequently purchased their counties, and sublet the hundreds—a sure way of encouraging extortion. On the other hand, many hundreds fell into the hands of neighbouring landowners either by royal grants of varying extent, by purchase from the sheriffs, or by usurpation. By the reign of Edward I more than half were in private hands.³ As in all the communal courts, the judgment proceeded from the whole body of people who constituted the court, and in the case of the hundred these people (“suitors” as they were called) seem to have been usually quite small landowners, and it soon became the practice for the obligation of attending the court to be restricted to the owners of particular pieces of land—another peculiarity which is common in the middle ages.