cognitions and petty assizes ordered
by the king's writ, where the property in dispute was worth no
more than 200s. [ten pounds] a year. The four knights came to be
selected by the suitors of the county court rather than by the
sheriff.

This assize procedure extended in time to all other types of civil
actions.

Also removable to the Royal Court from the county courts were
issues of a lord's claim to a person as his villein (combat not
available), service or relief due to a lord, dower rights, a
creditor's refusal to restore a gage [something given as security]
to a debtor who offered payment or a deposit, money due to a
lender, a seller, or a person to whom one had an obligation under
a charter, fish or harvest or cattle taken from lands unjustly
occupied, cattle taken from pasture, rights to enjoy a common, to
stop troubling someone's transport, to make restitution of land
wrongfully occupied, to make a lord's bailiff account to him for
the profits of the manor.

The Royal Court also decided disputes regarding baronies, nuisance
or encroachments on royal land or public ways or public waterways,
such as diverting waters from their right course and issues of
nuisance by the making or destroying of a ditch or the destruction
of a pond by a mill to the injury of a person's freehold. Other
pleas of the Crown were: insult to the royal dignity, treason,
breaches of safe-conducts, and injury to the King's servants.

Henry involved the Royal Court in many criminal issues, using the
agencies of the county and hundred courts. To detect crimes, he
required royal justices to routinely ask selected representatives:
knights or other landholders, of every neighborhood if any person
were suspected of any murder, robbery, theft, etc. A traveling
royal justice or a sheriff would then hold an inquest, in which
the representatives answered by oath what people were reputed to
have done certain crimes. They made such inquiries through assizes
of presentment, usually composed of twelve men from each hundred
and the four best men of each township. (These later evolved into
grand juries). These assizes were an ancient institution in many
parts of the country. They consisted of representatives of the
hundreds, usually knights, and villages who testified under oath
to all crimes committed in their neighborhood, and indicted those
they suspected as responsible and those harboring them. What
Henry's assize did was to insist upon the adopti