with full justice to all parties, and with accuracy, certainty, and dispatch. It was a businesslike system for busy and businesslike men.
In the history of judicial administration the personal initiative of Henry II is more evident than in finance. The king had an especial fondness for legal questions and often participated in their decision, yet his influence was exerted particularly to develop a system of courts and judges which could work in his absence and without his intervention. Although the institution is found previously both in England and Normandy, it is in Henry's reign that the system of itinerant justices is fully organized with regular circuits and a rapidly extending jurisdiction which broke down local privileges and exemptions and by its decisions created the common law. Hitherto chiefly a feudal assembly concerned with
the causes of the king and his barons, after Henry's time the king's court is a permanent body of professional judges and a tribunal for the whole realm. It is no accident that his reign produced in the treatise of Glanvill on The Laws and Customs of England the first of the great series of textbooks which are the landmarks of English legal development. Henry's reign is also an important period in the growth of Norman law, the
earliest formulation of which reaches us ten years after
his death in the Très Ancien Coutumier de Normandie,
and the reduction of local custom to writing is a process
