on to our unhappy forefathers. There was scarcely a class in
the country which did not find itself aggrieved as the king waged war
with the claims of "privilege" to stand above right and justice and truth.
But all resistance of turbulent and discontented factions was vain.
The great justiciars at the head of the legal administration, De
Lucy and Glanville, steadily carried out the new code, and a body of
lawyers was trained under them which formed a class wholly unknown
elsewhere in Europe. Instead of arbitrary and inflicting decisions,
varying in every hundred and every franchise according to the fashion of
the district, the judges of the Exchequer or Curia Regis declared
judgments which were governed by certain general principles. The
traditions of the great administrators of Henry's Court were handed down
through the troubled reigns of his sons; and the whole of the later
Common law is practically based on the decisions of two judges whose
work was finished within fifty years of Henry's death, and whose labours
formed the materials from which in 1260 Bracton drew up the greatest
work ever written on English law.

There was, in fact, in all Christendom no such system of government or
of justice as that which Henry's reforms built up. The king became the
fountain of law in a way till then unknown. The later jealousy of the
royal power which grew up with the advance of industrial activity, with
the growth of public opinion and of its means of expressing itself, with
the development of national experience and national self-dependence, had
no place in Henry's days, and had indeed no reason for existence. The
strife for the abolition of privileges which in the nineteenth century
was waged by the people was in the twelfth century waged by the Crown.
In that time, if in no other, the assertion of the supreme authority of
the king meant the assertion of the supreme authority of a common law;
and there was, in fact, no country in Europe where the whole body of the
baronage and of the clergy was so early and so completely brought into
bondage to the law of the land. Since all courts were royal courts,
since all law was royal law, since no justice was known but his, and its
conduct lay wholly in the hands of his trained servants, there was no
reason for the king to look with jealousy on the authority exercised by
the law over any of his officers or servants. It may possibly be due to
this fact that in England alone, of all countr