Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/262

242 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. " he shall be in seisin of freedom " — a phrase worth remembering for the light it throws on medieval habits of thought. Freedom, like land, is not everybody's to enjoy. It is a thing of value, and as such it can be possessed, inherited, or released from adverse claims by a charter.^ It would perhaps be rash to attribute a great part to humanitarian motives in this royal jurisdiction. False claims of villeinage might well be calculated, if not designed, to deprive the .King or other lords of tenants and services; even false confessions of villeinage to avoid an immediate adverse judgment were not unknown. But a court which interferes in these matters on the side of freedom, when it interferes at all, must appear in a favorable light to those who are benefited by its action, whatever the ultimate grounds may be. The King had the credit of protect- ing men in their persons as well as in their possessions against the hand of the spoiler. Deposuit pote7ites de sede et exaltavit humiles. Payment of money due, where there was nothing else in issue, seems to have been enforced by the King's court only by way of exception, and not as a matter of regular duty, down to the middle of the thirteenth century. Long afterwards the judges were still anything but sure of their footing in this region; more than once or twice they lost heart and turned back from a promising line of advance ; and it was only in the latter half of the fifteenth century that the formidable rivalry of the canonists, who were drawing business from them to the Church courts, drove them to acquiesce in the invention of a comprehensive form of remedy for breaches of agreement. But the bold creations of Henry II. had effectually laid the foundations of the King's justice as an expansive power before the end of the twelfth century. The shocks which the King's personal influence received through the perversity of John and the weakness of Henry III. left this untouched ; and in the latter years of the thirteenth century the wise policy of Edward I. consolidated his ancestor's work into a system of exceeding strength and stability. Then, and for long afterwards, the King's justice was by no means the only justice in the realm. But from the days of Edward I. at latest it was destined to overshadow all rivals. Frederick Pollock. 1 Glanv. Book. V. is the authority for all this. The treatment of an affirmative ex- ception as a preliminary counter-claim is not anomalous in itself, but rather charac- teristic of medieval dialectic. It persisted in Scotland down to modern times. See L. Q. R. ix. 274.