s, and held very
frequent sessions. There were probably seven, eight, or nine hundred
courts _a month_, in the kingdom; the object being, as Blackstone says,
"_to bring justice home to every man's door_." (_3 Blackstone_, 30.) The
number of the _county_ courts, of course, corresponded to the number of
counties, (36.) The _court-leet_ was the criminal court for a district
less than a county. The _hundred court_ was the court for one of those
districts anciently called a _hundred_, because, at the time of their
first organization for judicial purposes, they comprised (as is
supposed) but a hundred families.[44] The court-baron was the court for
a single manor, and there was a court for every manor in the kingdom.
All these courts were holden as often as once in three or five weeks;
the county court once a month. The king's judges were present at none of
these courts; the only officers in attendance being sheriffs, bailiffs,
and stewards, merely ministerial, and not judicial, officers; doubtless
incompetent, and, if not incompetent, untrustworthy, for giving the
juries any reliable information in matters of law, beyond what was
already known to the jurors themselves. And yet these were the courts,
in which was done all the judicial business, both civil and criminal, of
the nation, except appeals, and some of the more important and difficult
cases.[45] It is plain that the juries, in these courts, must, of
necessity, have been the sole judges of all matters of law whatsoever;
because there was no one present, but sheriffs, bailiffs, and stewards,
to give them any instructions; and surely it will not be pretended that
the jurors were bound to take their law from such sources as these.

In the second place, it is manifest that the principles of law, by which
the juries determined causes, were, as a general rule, nothing else than
their own ideas of natural equity, _and not any laws of the king_;
because but few laws were enacted, and many of those were not written,
but only agreed upon in council.[46] Of those that were written, few
copies only were made, (printing being then unknown,) and not enough to
supply all, or any considerable number, of these numerous courts. Beside
and beyond all this, few or none of the jurors could have read the laws,
if they had been written; because few or none of the common people
could, at that time, read. Not only were the common people unable to
read their own language, but, at the time of Ma