provided by the formation of manorial custom. It was in the interest of the lord himself to strengthen the customary order which prevented grasping stewards and serjeants from ruining the peasantry by extortions and arbitrary rule. This led to the great enrolments of custom as to holdings and services, of which many have come down to us from the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; they were a safeguard for the interests both of the tenants and of the lord.
The complex machinery of the manor as the centre of economic affairs and of social relations demanded by itself a suitable organisation. But besides this the manor was the local centre for purposes of police and justice; it had to enforce the king's commands and the law of the realm in its locality. It would be more correct to say that the manor and the village community or township underlying it were regarded as local centres of justice and police, because in these political matters the double aspect of the manor, the fact of its being composed of an upper and a lower half, came quite as plainly to the fore in its economic working. Indeed, for purposes of justice, taxation, supervision of vagabonds, catching and watching thieves, keeping in order roads, and the like, the government did not recognise as the direct local unit the manor, but the vill, the village community or town, as the old English term went. The vill had to look after the formation of frankpledge, to keep ward, to watch over prisoners and to conduct them to gaol, to make presentments to justices and to appear at the sheriff's turn. This fact is a momentous piece of historical evidence as to the growth of manorial jurisdiction, but, apart from that, it has to be noticed as a feature of the actual administration of justice and police during the feudal period. It may be said that when the central power appealed directly to the population either for help or for responsibility, it did so through the medium not of the manors, but of the ancient towns or townships merged in them.
But there were many affairs delegated to the care of the manor, in which the central power intervened only indirectly. There was the whole domain of petty jurisdiction over villeins, as subjects of the lord, there were the numberless cases arising from agrarian transgressions and disputes, there were disputes between tenants of the same lord in regard to land held from him, there were the franchises, that is, the powers surrendered by special grants of the government or by immemorial encroachment of the lords in regard to tolls, market rights, the assize of bread and ale and other matters of commercial police, to the trying of thieves, poachers, and the like. In all these respects the manorial lord was called upon to act according to his standing and warranted privileges. But in no case could he act alone and by himself: he acted in his court and through his court. Originally this court, the halimote, the hall meeting, as we may translate the term, dealt with all sorts of affairs: it tried the cases where villeins were concerned,
