Читать книгу A Concise History of the Common Law - Theodore F. T. Plucknett - Страница 96

When we come to the county, however, we find that seignorial influence was less easy to assert. In one or two cases the office of sheriff became hereditary in a great family, but this advantage was soon destroyed by the strictness with which hereditary sheriffs, like all other sheriffs, had to account to the Exchequer. Even the appointment of an earl did not have the effect of putting the county into private hands; the county was still administered by a royal sheriff accountable to the Crown, the earl only receiving the third penny. A few counties became palatine, that is to say, exempt, or almost so, from royal jurisdiction (Chester, Lancaster and Durham); for this there were definite military reasons, as these border counties had to be kept almost continuously on a war footing as a defence against the Welsh and Scotch. The processes which we have seen at work in the township and the hundred, the Crown refused to tolerate in the county; and so the county became the basis of royal power in local government.

Generally speaking, therefore, private persons did not enjoy any jurisdiction higher than that of a hundred court with court leet. The result was inevitably to simplify the task of the Crown in effecting and maintaining the unity of the country, and, in the end, to facilitate the rise of the common law into its present position of complete and unrivalled primacy. At one moment, however, it seemed that things might have been otherwise. Even before the Conquest there were some very extensive private jurisdictions, and after the Conquest they continued to exist in a more feudalised form, very frequently being styled “Honours”. The honour was governed by a court which consisted of the barons who held land of it, and the procedure and jurisdiction of the court resembled closely that of the King’s own court. A few good examples¹ of cases in honorial courts in the middle of the twelfth century show how important questions of property could be litigated, and sometimes settled by means of final concords, in the court of an honour without the necessity of invoking royal justice or its machinery.²

The decline of such jurisdictions is an important factor in our legal history. Some survived late because they were held by churches, but many vanished through escheat or forfeiture, or were broken up through descent to heiresses. There seems to have been little direct attack upon them at any date, though they must all have felt in time the competition of the royal courts with which they had concurrent jurisdiction principally in matters of real property.

We have therefore traced, very briefly, the characteristics of the old communal jurisdictions, together with their partial subjection to the growing forces of seignorial jurisdiction. The only place where these forces were checked was in the county, and their antagonist there was the Norman monarchy. We now come, therefore, to the consideration of the power of the Crown over the more ancient local jurisdictions.