and in such a case the traveller
was never seen again alive. Tales of Robin Hood began to take shape. The
by-ways and thickets were peopled with men, innocent or guilty, but all
alike desperate. One Richard, we read, whose fellow at the plough fell
dead in an epileptic fit, fled in terror of the judges to the woods, and
so did many a worse man than Richard. We find constantly the same tale of
the sudden quarrel, the blow with a stick or a stone, the thrust with the
knife which every man carried, the stroke with a hatchet. Then the slayer
in his panic flies to a nun's garden, to a monastery, or to the shelter of
a church, where the men of the village keep guard over him till knights
of the shire are sent from the Court, to whom he confesses his crime,
and who allow him so many days to fly to the nearest port and forsake
the kingdom. Perhaps he never reaches the coast, but takes to the woods,
already haunted by "abjurors" like himself, or by outlaws flying from
justice. In the social conditions of the England of that day the
administration of justice was, in more ways than one, a very critical
matter, and the efforts of over-zealous judges and sheriffs might easily
end in driving the people to desperation before the severity of the law,
or in crushing out under a heedless taxation a prosperity which was
still new and still rare.

Henry perhaps already saw the deep current of discontent which only a
year later was to break out in the most terrible rebellion of his reign.
In any case the severity of the measures which he took shows how serious
he thought the crisis. After his landing in March 1170 one month was
given to inquiry as to the state of the country. In the beginning of
April he held a council to consider the reform of justice. A commission
was appointed to examine, during the next two months, every freeholder
throughout the kingdom as to the conduct of judges and sheriffs and
every other officer charged with the duty of collecting or accounting
for the public money. Its members were chosen from among the most
zealous opponents of the Court officials-the great barons, the priors,
the important abbots of the shires--and they were all men who had no
connection with the Exchequer or the Curia Regis. Their work was done,
and their report presented within the time allowed; but the king,
practical, businesslike, impatient of abuses, like every vigorous
autocratic ruler, had no mind to wait two months to redress the grieva