Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/252

232 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. the other hand he may sometimes, on being satisfied of the facts, issue a direct mandate which is both judicial and executive. One way or another, he hears and determines what may be called privileged causes, and his experimental or occasional methods are the starting-point of the procedure which his successors will elabo- rate. We must not look for a settled plan in the Conqueror's judicial or semi-judicial orders. At one point they may seem to the modern lawyer to resemble a judgment on appeal, at others an order for a trial before special commissioners, or for a new trial on cause shown, at another an injunction obtained at short notice ; but the resemblances to anything in latter-day practice are too fitful and precarious to help us much. Gradually, however, what was at first occasional became frequent in matters of recurring need, and what was proved to be of practical utility became custom- ary. The custom of the King's court hardened into rule, and within a century there was a distinct beginning of the system of writs and forms of action which was to fix the lines of the common law. The great commission of inquiry which recorded the taxable values of England twenty years after the Conquest, and whose report is preserved in Domesday Book, had no direct concern with any law but what we should now call revenue law, and only gives us occasional light by its incidental notices of disputed claims. Its problems really belong to the Anglo-Saxon period much more than to the Anglo-Norman, and to the student of economic history at least as much as to the lawyer. But the form of the Domesday inquest has an importance for the historian of law quite apart from its matter. We mark here the first appearance on English ground of a new means of getting authentic information. A report is made on oath by men of the place concerned, city, borough, or township, who are in a position to know the facts; it consists of answers returned to questions or articles of inquiry so drawn up by skilled persons as to make it plain what information is wanted ; it follows the lines of the inquiry, and is recorded on a methodical plan ; but there is nothing absolutely formal about it, and nothing to prevent explanatory matter from being added. Also " the machinery that furnishes the jurors," the existing taxable arrange- ment of hundreds and townships, " is native." ^ Thus the example was easy to be followed and likely to spread. The royal procedure 1 Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 275.