y maintained by his
actual presence and the sheer force of his personal authority, as he
hurried from country to country to quell a rising in Gascony or a revolt
in Galloway, to wage war in Wales, to finish the conquest of Britanny or
of Ireland, to order the administration of Poitou or Normandy. But in the
swift and terrible progresses of a king who visited the shires to north
and south and west in the intervals of foreign war, a long series of
experiments as to the best forms of internal government was ceaselessly
carried out, and the new administration securely established.

Henry, however, was at once met by a difficulty unknown to earlier days.
The system which the Conqueror had established of separate courts for
secular and ecclesiastical business had utterly broken down for purposes
of justice. Until the reign of Stephen much of the business of the
bishops was done in the courts of the hundred and the shire. The Church
courts also had at first been guided by the customary law and traditions
of the early English Church, which had grown up along with the secular
laws and had a distinctly national character. So long, indeed, as the
canon law remained somewhat vague, and the Church courts incomplete, they
could work peaceably side by side with the lay courts; but with the
development of ecclesiastical law in the middle of the twelfth century,
it was inevitable that difficulties should spring up. The boundaries of
civil and ecclesiastical law were wholly uncertain, the scientific study
of law had hardly begun, and there was much debatable ground which might
be won by the most arrogant or the most skilful of the combatants. Every
brawl of a few noisy lads in the Oxford streets or at the gates of some
cathedral or monastic school was enough to kindle the strife as to the
jurisdiction of Church or State which shook medieval society to its
foundation.

The Church courts not only had jurisdiction over the whole clerical order,
but exercised wide powers even over the laity. To them alone belonged the
right to enforce spiritual penalties, to deal with cases of oaths,
promises, anything in which a man's faith was pledged; to decide as to the
property of intestates, to pronounce in every case of inheritance whether
the heir was legitimate, to declare the law as to wills and marriage.
Administering as they did an enlightened system of law, they profited by
the new prosperity of the country, and the judicial and pecuniary disput