nd duties held good were not public, but
private. There was not at the first, and in the days of what we may
call "pure feudalism," any concept of a national law or natural right,
but only a bundle of individual rights. Appeal from injustice was not
made at a supreme law-court, but only to the courts of the barons to
whom both litigants owed allegiance. The action of the King was quite
naturally always directed towards breaking open this enclosed sphere of
influence, and endeavouring to multiply the occasions on which his
officials might interfere in the courts of his subjects. Thus the idea
gradually grew up (and its growth is perhaps the most important matter
of remark in mediaeval history), by which the King's law and the King's
rights were looked upon as dominating those of individuals or groups.
The courts baron and customary, and the sokes of privileged townships
were steadily emptied of their more serious cases, and shorn of their
primitive powers. This, too, was undoubtedly the reason for the royal
interference in the courts Christian (the feudal name for the clerical
criminal court). The King looked on the Church, as he looked on his
barons and his exempted townships, as outside his royal supremacy, and,
in consequence, quarrelled over investiture and criminous clerks, and
every other point in which he had not as yet secured that his writs and
judgments should prevail. There was a whole series of courts of law
which were absolutely independent of his officers and his decision. His
restless energy throughout this period had, therefore, no other aim than
to bring all these into a line with his own, and either to capture them
for himself, or to reduce them to sheer impotence. But at the beginning
there was little notion of a royal judge who should have power to
determine cases in which barons not immediately holding their fiefs of
the King were implicated. The concern of each was only with the lord
next above him. And the whole conception of legal rights was, therefore,
considered simply as private rights.

The growth of royal power consequently acted most curiously on
contemporary thinkers. It meant centralisation, the setting up of a
definite force which should control the whole kingdom. It resulted in
absolutism increasing, with an ever-widening sphere of royal control. It
culminated in the Reformation, which added religion to the other
departments of State in which royal interference held predominance. Till
th