something like a peace of the Empire was recognised and to a certain extent secured by the reforms of Maximilian's age. In England the "franchise" or right of private war was suppressed at a very early time. It did not tally with the social order inaugurated by the Norman Conquest, and the king's peace became one of the mainstays of early Common Law. The only period when the real disruption of sovereignty through private war seemed to prevail was the interregnum when Stephen of Boulogne and the Plantagenets struggled for the Crown. But this lapse into anarchy was short, and from the time when Henry II restored order, private war ceased to be recognised as a legal outcome of disputes. Yet the conditions of military contract remained the foundation of government, and this made it possible for opposition to wrong to take the form of armed resistance. The revolt against John, the barons' war against Henry III, the risings of Mortimer and Bolingbroke, the Wars of the Roses, have as their necessary background a society ruled by groups of knights, who considered themselves not merely as subjects, but as peers of the king.
One of the most important consequences of the disruption of sovereignty lay in the alienation of rights of jurisdiction by the central government. As early as the ninth and tenth centuries we observe everywhere the growth of franchises and immunities which break up the ordinary sub-divisions of countries in respect of the administration of justice. The English shires and hundreds, the continental counties and Grafschaften are riddled with districts in which the place of the ordinary judges of the land is taken by secular or ecclesiastical magnates or their representatives, among whom the secular judges of ecclesiastical corporations, the advocati (avoués, Vogte), are the most conspicuous. The Sac and Soc grants of Anglo-Saxon kings, as well as the various privileges of immunity conferred by Carolingian, Franconian and Saxon monarchs, present different steps in the process of political dismemberment. The central authorities merely strove to retain their hold on the most important varieties of jurisdiction, especially judgments as to great crimes, the Ungerichte, as they were termed in Germany, for which a man may lose his head and his hand (Haupt und Hand), while jurisdiction in minor cases, when a person would only be chastised in skin or hair (in Haut oder Haar), were left to local potentates. From similar considerations early English kings tried as much as possible to retain in their hand the great forfeitures. This led eventually to a classification of feudal tribunals according to the amount of jurisdiction acquired by them, some claiming high and some low justice (haute or basse justice)[1]. The proceedings of Quo Warranto instituted by Edward I after his victory over the baronial opposition shew a most exuberant growth of prescriptive rights in regard to the use of gallows, pillory,
- ↑ The medium justice (moyenne justice) was a later development and was not generally accepted.
