r testimony in all questions of
property, public privilege, rights of trade, local liberties, exemption
from taxes; if the king demanded an "aid" for the marriage of his daughter
or the coming of age of his son, they assessed the amount to be paid; if
he wanted to count an estate among the royal Forests, it was they who
decided whether the land was his by ancient right. They were employed
too in all kinds of business for the Court; they might be sent to
examine a criminal who had fled to the refuge of a church, or to see
whether a sick man had appointed an attorney, or whether a litigant who
pleaded illness was really in bed without his breeches. If in any case
the verdict of the Shire Court was disputed, they were summoned to
Westminster to repeat the record of the county. No people probably ever
went through so severe a discipline or received so efficient a training
in the practical work of carrying out the law, as was given to the
English people in the hundred years that lay between the Assize of
Clarendon in 1166 and the Parliament summoned by De Montfort in 1265,
where knights from every shire elected in the county court were called
to sit with the bishops and great barons in the common Parliament of the
realm.

In the pitiless routine of their work, however, the barons of the
Exchequer were at this early time scarcely regarded as judges administering
justice so much as tax-gatherers for a needy treasury. Baron and churchman
and burgher alike saw every question turn to a demand of money to swell
the royal Hoard; jurors were fined for any trifling flaw in legal
procedure; widows were fined for leave to marry, guardians for leave to
receive their wards; if a peasant were kicked by his horse, if in fishing
he fell from the side of his boat, or if in carrying home his eels or
herrings he stumbled and was crushed by the cart-wheel, his wretched
children saw horse or boat or cart with its load of fish which in older
days had been forfeited as "deodand" to the service of God, now carried
off to the king's Hoard; if a miller was caught in the wheel of his mill
the sheriff must see the price of it paid to the royal treasury. In the
country districts where coin was perhaps scarcely ever seen, where
wages were unknown, and such little traffic as went on was wholly a
matter of barter, the peasants must often have been put to the greatest
straits to find money for the fines. Year after year baron as well as
peasant and farmer s