jurisdiction in motion. The second eventuality occurred when one of the parties to a suit actually contested the justice of a particular decision or sentence. He could in French feudal law attaint or falsify the verdict by pronouncing the formula, "je vous appelle de faux jugement." This meant that he challenged the fairness and honour of the judges, and the result was single combat between the protesting party and one or several of the judges, not a satisfactory solution of the difficulties from our point of view, nor, probably, from that of many judges concerned. There were devices which rendered such attaint hazardous in some cases: the members of the tribunal could pronounce the decision in corpore, and in this case the option for the dissatisfied party was to fight them all. In any case this mode of appeal was directed towards the revision of the judgment by God rather than by man, and at bottom did not subvert the principle that a man ought to be judged by his peers and by his peers only. It is hardly necessary to add that the falsifying of judgments has been described here in conformity to strict rules of feudal theory. In practice all sorts of compromises took place. In England, for example, the revision of judgments by higher courts was brought about at a very early stage by the intervention of the king's court, though not without opposition from the barons. An instructive case occurred, for example, in the reign of William the Conqueror. In a trial as to land between Bishop Gundulf of Rochester and Picot, the Sheriff of Cambridgeshire, the county pronounced in favour of the latter, but through the intervention of Odo of Bayeux twelve representatives of the shire were called up to confirm the verdict by oath in the king's court, and ultimately, after a declaration by a monk who had been steward of the estate in question, the unlucky doomsmen were driven either to go through the ordeal of redhot iron or to recant. The indirect way in which the prejudiced intervention of the higher powers took effect in this case is characteristic of the traditional difficulties which stood in the way of downright revision. As on many other occasions, there are threads connecting feudal theory with recent or actual practice, and we may not unreasonably see in the doctrine as to the finality of jury verdicts a modernised offshoot of the older doctrine of the judgment by peers. Of course the differentiation between questions of fact and questions of law has made it possible to concede to juries the highly privileged position which they generally enjoy, but the germ of the corresponding rules is historically connected with the immunity from outside influence which formed one of the most characteristic traits of the feudal judgment by peers[1].
Similar phenomena meet our eye when we come to consider the processes of legislation obtaining in the feudal world. It is evident in theory that a baron, being a sovereign, could not be subjected to any will but his own, and that therefore such common arrangements as had
- ↑ Bigelow, Placita Anglo-normannica, p. 34.
