A GOVERNMENT OF LAW a great court at Westminster by whose agency a new system of royal law, which formed its source in the person of the king, was brought in to remedy the defects of the old, unelastic system of customary law pre vailing in the provincial courts of the people. This new system of royal law was sent down to the popular courts existing in the shires by the hands of the itinerant justices who there represented the crown first for fiscal then for judicial purposes. During the reigns of the four Norman kings the English and Norman races became fused together into one nation scarcely conscious yet of its own unity. As soon as that condition of things was reached in which it was difficult to distinguish an Englishman from a Nor man, all legal distinctions in favor of one race as against the other necessarily passed out of view. The substructure of the new political and legal fabric which thus arose out of the amalgamation of races was Eng lish, the superstructure was Norman. The welding together of the two systems re ceived a temporary check during the period of disorganization known as the reign of Stephen, a period during which the royal authority which Henry I had done so much to consolidate came to an end, while Eng land, for the first and last time in her history, sank into that state of feudal anarchy which the Conqueror by his far-sighted policy had striven to prevent. For a time the land lay helpless in the hands of the barons, who entrenched themselves in their unlicensed castles and arrogated to themselves all the rights of petty despots. The great mission of Henry II, Henry of Anjou, was to re establish order and with it the reign of equal law. The full scope of Henry's policy was not only to establish the reign of law, but to reduce all orders of men to a state of equal ity under the same system of law; in other words, to establish the supremacy of the law as afterwards understood. The most formidable obstacles which stood in the way of the complete execution of that design were the baronage on the one hand, with their
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private jurisdictions, and the clergy on the other, with their far-reaching claims of ex emption from the ordinary process of the temporal tribunals. When Henry II passed away, the prodigal knight errant who suc ceeded him, Richard I, impressed upon the nation, then marshaled in the ranks of the three estates, the necessity for concert of action against a central despotism capable of oppressing every class by the imposition of inordinate taxation. The hope that the accession of John would relieve that condi tion was quickly disappointed. His needs proved as great as Richard's, and the money he obtained was used for purposes that ap pealed to no one but himself. The exces sive exactions demanded both in money and service, coupled to the unpopular uses to which these were put, form the keynote of the whole reign; they form the background of Magna Charta. When viewed in the light of the circumstances attending its execution, the fact clearly appears that while that great instrument was issued in the form of a royal grant, it was really a constitutional compact entered into by the royal authority on the one hand and the nation marshaled in the ranks of the three estates on the other. There is nothing in the provisions of the charter to recall obsolete distinctions of English and Norman blood; there is nothing to suggest differences of English and Nor man law. The very absence of such pro visions clearly shows that such distinctions had passed forever away. The winning of the Great Charter was the final consummation of the work of union, and this first great act of the united nation was not in the path of political experiment. The provisions of the charter embody no abstract theory of government; they consist simply of a sum ming up of the traditional liberties of the English nation, with such modifications as those liberties had suffered through the re sults of the Norman Conquest. The royal pretentions born of that event reached the limit of their growth when both Richard and John, accepting the imperialist theories of
