tenement without the king’s express order. By 1200 a maxim was
developing into a rule that no one could be made to answer for his free-
hold, in his lord’s court or anywhere else, except on the authority of a
royal writ.^110 Into the thirteenth century the writs that formed the basis
of Glanvill’s treatise were being adapted and supplemented to provide
new remedies. Notably writs of entryallowed claimants to recover lands
which tenants had entered legally but only (for example) by means of
leases which had now expired or as the heirs or grantees of now dead
disseisors.^111
The development of the forms of English law was erratic and impro-
vised. The strength of the law was in its integration, by the king’s will,
of communal processes of dispute-settlement in the courts of lordship
and shire with the expert jurisdiction of royal and ecclesiastical judges.
The king of England did not, like the German emperors, ordain a peace
and leave its enforcement to the magnates. Even when they were
abroad—and in the twelfth century they spent much time in their
French dominions—Norman and Angevin kings continued to institute
legal proceedings in English courts by writs de ultra mareaddressed to
their English viceroys, the justiciars, who carried on the process by
further writs to the sheriffs.^112 In the early part of the twelfth century the
local public courts reigned supreme. Henry I had asserted, in an
edict communicated to the counties by writs, that the king’s shire and
hundred courts should be held at the same times and places as before
the Conquest (‘and not otherwise’), and be attended by all the men of
the shires to hear the king’s pleas and judgments; and he had extended
the shire court’s jurisdiction in land cases to cover disputes between the
men of two different lords (and not just where these lords were tenants-
in-chief), since there were then two competing honour courts.^113
Probably from the time of the Conquest there was the procedure called
tolt(set in motion by simple complaint to the sheriff) for demonstrating
that there had been a default of right in a seignorial court which justified
the shire court in taking over.^114 Henry I experimented with ‘justices of
all England’ (justitiarii totius Anglie) to go from his court on a journey
(iter, ‘eyre’) throughout the counties, to hear a variety of pleas (rather
than the single great lawsuits which the curia regis had dealt with
before), but he also fostered the appointment of justiciars for individual
Justice by royal writ in England 133(^110) Royal Writs in England, 214–25, 496–9.
(^111) Early Registers of Writs, ed. E. de Haas and G. D. G. Hall, Selden Soc. 87 (London,
1970), pp. xlii–xliii; G. D. G. Hall, ‘The Early History of Entry sur disseisin’, Tulane Law
Review, 42 (1967–8), 584–602.
(^112) D. Bates, ‘The Origins of the Justiciarship’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 4 (1981), 1–12; id.,
‘The earliest Norman writs’, EHR100 (1985), 269 ff.
(^113) EHDii. 433–4.
(^114) D. M. Stenton, English Justice between the Norman Conquest and the Great Charter
(London, 1965), 27, 138–9.