er way. In fact, all
history informs us that anciently the attempts of the kings to introduce
or establish new laws, met with determined resistance from the people,
and generally resulted in failure. "_Nolumus Leges Angliae mutari_," (we
will that the laws of England be not changed,) was a determined
principle with the Anglo-Saxons, from which they seldom departed, up to
the time of Magna Carta, and indeed until long after.[43]

SECTION II.

_The Ancient Common Law Juries were mere Courts of Conscience._

But it is in the administration of justice, or of law, that the freedom
or subjection of a people is tested. If this administration be in
accordance with the arbitrary will of the legislator--that is, if his
will, as it appears in his statutes, be the highest rule of decision
known to the judicial tribunals,--the government is a despotism, and the
people are slaves. If, on the other hand, the rule of decision be those
principles of natural equity and justice, which constitute, or at least
are embodied in, the general conscience of mankind, the people are free
in just so far as that conscience is enlightened.

That the authority of the king was of little weight with the _judicial
tribunals_, must necessarily be inferred from the fact already stated,
that his authority over the _people_ was but weak. If the authority of
his laws had been paramount in the judicial tribunals, it would have
been paramount with the people, of course; because they would have had
no alternative but submission. The fact, then, that his laws were _not_
authoritative with the people, is proof that they were _not_
authoritative with the tribunals--in other words, that they were not, as
matter of course, enforced by the tribunals.

But we have additional evidence that, up to the time of Magna Carta, the
laws of the king were not binding upon the judicial tribunals; and if
they were not binding before that time, they certainly were not
afterwards, as has already been shown from Magna Carta itself. It is
manifest from all the accounts we have of the courts in which juries
sat, prior to Magna Carta, such as the court-baron, the hundred court,
the court-leet, and the county court, _that they were mere courts of
conscience, and that the juries were the judges, deciding causes
according to their own notions of equity, and not according to any laws
of the king, unless they thought them just_.

These courts, it must be considered, were very numerou