styled the "common law" which
had grown up in the past. They could enforce their decisions only by
directions to an independent officer, the sheriff, and here again their
right was soon rigidly bounded by set form and custom. These bonds in fact
became tighter every day, for their decisions were now beginning to be
reported, and the cases decided by one bench of judges became authorities
for their successors. It is plain that such a state of things has the
utmost value in many ways, whether in creating in men's minds that
impersonal notion of a sovereign law which exercises its imaginative force
on human action, or in furnishing by the accumulation and sacredness of
precedents a barrier against the invasion of arbitrary power. But it threw
a terrible obstacle in the way of the actual redress of wrong. The
increasing complexity of human action as civilization advanced outstripped
the efforts of the law. Sometimes ancient custom furnished no redress for a
wrong which sprang from modern circumstances. Sometimes the very pedantry
and inflexibility of the law itself became in individual cases the highest
injustice.

[Sidenote: Equitable Jurisdiction]

It was the consciousness of this that made men cling even from the first
moment of the independent existence of these courts to the judicial power
which still remained inherent in the Crown itself. If his courts fell short
in any matter the duty of the king to do justice to all still remained, and
it was this obligation which was recognized in the provision of Henry the
Second by which all cases in which his judges failed to do justice were
reserved for the special cognizance of the royal Council itself. To this
final jurisdiction of the King in Council Edward gave a wide developement.
His assembly of the ministers, the higher permanent officials, and the law
officers of the Crown for the first time reserved to itself in its judicial
capacity the correction of all breaches of the law which the lower courts
had failed to repress, whether from weakness, partiality, or corruption,
and especially of those lawless outbreaks of the more powerful baronage
which defied the common authority of the judges. Such powers were of course
capable of terrible abuse, and it shows what real need there was felt to be
for their exercise that though regarded with jealousy by Parliament the
jurisdiction of the royal Council appears to have been steadily put into
force through the two centuries whi