money for royal writs; for journeys to line up witnesses and to visit various courts;
for the expenses of his clerical staff; and for gifts to numerous officials. Yet it was all
worthwhile in the end, for “at length by grace of the lord king and by the judgment
of his court my uncle’s land was adjudged to me.”^3
The whole system was no doubt originally designed to put things right after the
civil war. Although these law-and-order measures were initially expensive for the king
—he had to build many new jails, for example—they ultimately served to increase
royal income and power. Fines came from condemned criminals and also from
knightly representatives who failed to show up at the eyre when summoned;
revenues poured in from the purchase of writs. The exchequer, as the financial
bureau of England was called, recorded all the fines paid for judgments and the sums
collected for writs. The amounts, entered on parchment leaves sewn together and
stored as rolls, became the Receipt Rolls and Pipe Rolls, the first of many such
records of the English monarchy and an indication that writing had become a tool to
institutionalize royal rule in England.
Perhaps the most important outcome of this expanded legal system was the
enhancement of royal power and prestige. The king of England touched (not
personally but through men acting in his name) nearly every man and woman in the
realm. However, the extent of royal jurisdiction should not be exaggerated. Most
petty crimes did not end up in royal courts but rather in more local ones under the
jurisdiction of a lord. Thus the case of Hugh Tree came before a manorial court run
by officials of the monastery of Bec. They held that he was “in mercy [liable to a
fine] for his beasts caught in the lord’s garden.”^4 He had to pay six pence to his lord
(in this case the monastery); no money went to the king. This helps explain why
manorial lords—barons, knights, bishops, and monasteries like Bec—held on
tenaciously to their local prerogatives.
In addition to local courts were those run by and for the clergy. Had Hugh Tree
committed murder, he would have come before a royal court. Had he been a
homicidal cleric, however, he would have come before a church court, which could
be counted on to give him a mild punishment. No wonder that churchmen objected
to submitting to the jurisdiction of Henry II’s courts. But Henry insisted—and not
only on that point, but also on the king’s right to have ultimate jurisdiction over
church appointments and property disputes. The ensuing contest between the king
and his appointed archbishop, Thomas Becket (1118–1170), became the greatest
battle between the church and the state in the twelfth century. At a meeting held at
Clarendon in 1164, Becket agreed, among other things, that clerics “cited and
