ies in the world, the
police, the civil servants, the soldiers, are tried in the same courts
and by the same code as any private citizen; and that in England and
lands settled by English peoples alone the Common law still remains the
ultimate and only appeal for every subject of the realm.

But the power which was taken from certain privileged classes and put in
the hands of the king was in effect by Henry's Assize given back to the
people at large. Foreigner as he was, Henry preserved to Englishmen an
inheritance which had been handed down from an immemorial past, and
which had elsewhere vanished away or was slipping fast into forgetfulness.
According to the Roman system, which in the next century spread over
Europe, all law and government proceeded directly from the king, and the
subject had no right save that of implicit obedience; the system of
representation and the idea of the jury had no place in it. Teutonic
tradition, on the other hand, looked upon the nation as a commonwealth,
and placed the ultimate authority in the will of the whole people; the
law was the people's law--it was to be declared and carried out in the
people's courts. At a very critical moment, when everything was shifting,
uncertain, transitional, Henry's legislation established this tradition
for England. By his Assize Englishmen were still to be tried in their
ancient courts. Justice was to be administered by the ancient machinery
of shire-moot and hundred-moot, by the legal men of hundred and township,
by the lord and his steward. The shire-moot became the king's court in
so far as its president was a king's judge and its procedure regulated
by the king's decree; but it still remained the court of the people, to
which the freemen gathered as their fathers had done to the folk-moot,
and where judgment could only be pronounced by the verdict of the
freeholders who sat in the court. The king's action indeed was determined
by a curious medley of chance circumstances and rooted prejudices. The
canon law was fast spreading over his foreign states, and wherever the
canon law came in the civil law followed in its train. But in England
local liberties were strong, the feudal system had never been completely
established, insular prejudice against the foreigner and foreign ways was
alert, the Church generally still held to national tradition, the king
was at deadly feud with the Primate, and was quite resolved to have no
customs favoured by him brought