make over the land they held to others in such a way as to retain for themselves the nominal possession and feudal incidents in the land. If they sold, they must sell outright, so that the new purchaser stood in the same relation to the overlord that the seller had occupied. Indirectly this resulted in the breaking up of the great baronial estates into smaller holdings owned by men who, though tenants directly from the king, held too small an estate to be a menace to the royal power. The land law developed in Edward's reign moulded the social and economic history of England down to the present day.

53. The writ-issuing power.—Another chapter of the Second Statute of Westminster (1285) throws an important light on the history of procedure. It has been pointed out that a characteristic element of the litigation in the King's Court was the writ process. A complainant could get a remedy from the royal court only if he had a writ by which the king commanded the court to do justice in such a case. As the number and variety of the cases handled by the king's courts increased, blank forms of the writs that could be issued to suit the different cases were kept by the king's secretary, the chancellor, and the clerks of his office-the masters in chancery, as they were called. These could be had

courts on the pay

by applicants for justice in the ment of fees, some of them fixed, some of them the subject of special bargains. As late as Henry III's time, a royal writ for the recovery of a debt cost the plaintiff a fourth or more of the amount of the debt. The writs framed to meet ordinary cases of

continual recurrence were, however, obtainable for a moderate fixed price. These were called brevia de cursu or "writs of course." For a long time the king, or in reality the chancellor and his clerks, had very free discretion in making new writs for new cases. But as it became clear that the power to make new writs was really a power to grant new remedies, that is, to make new law, Parliament, jealous of its nascent legislative functions, began to protest. Even in Henry III's reign, before Parliament was a definite body with regular sessions, the barons by the Provisions of Oxford had forced the chancellor to swear that "he would seal no writs except 'writs of course' without the commandment of the king and of his council." Further than this, the judges began to assume the right to decide on the validity of the writs on which actions were brought before them.

An attempt to mitigate the severity of this double check on the expansion of the law through the royal power to create new remedies was made by the Statute of Westminster II referred to above. One of its clauses allowed the chancellor to issue a new writ whenever "in one case a writ is found and in like case (consimili casu) falling under like law and requiring like remedy is found none." In later generations this clause was used to create very many new actions. Indeed the law of tort and also that of contract are in large part traceable to writs consimili casu, modeled on the earlier writs of trespass and deceit. But in Edward's own time the judges seem to have allowed but little effect to the pro

vision made by the statute for expansion. The list of writs was treated as practically fixed, and the addition of new remedies required parliamentary action. Already was becoming apparent the tendency of the common law to ossify.

54. The courts of law. Not only the substance of the law but the institutions by which it was formulated and administered assumed during Edward's reign much of the character that they were to bear until modern times. Under the need of specialization imposed upon it by the growing burden of its work, the central court of the king had been gradually splitting into three distinct courts. Even in Henry II's reign the fiscal department of the court -the Exchequer-had begun to specialize its organization for the better administration of the king's revenue, and especially for the judicial questions originating in the course of its collection. Magna Charta had provided that a division of the court should sit constantly in a fixed place for the settlement of disputes between private individuals over land and over claims for money debts or chattels wrongfully withheld; this division was known as the Common Bench or Court of Common Pleas. Originally the King's Pleas, the causes originating from breaches of the king's peace, were to be heard by the king himself, and so in theory the King's Bench was a division of the court which followed the king's person wherever he might journey. In practice, both the personal attendance, which Henry II and also John had made in a measure actual, and the migration of the court with the king's movements

about the country, ceased during the long minority of Henry III. The king came to be present at the sessions of the Court of King's Bench only by his representative, the Chief Justice. But the King's Bench retained in its jurisdiction traces of its special importance. It heard both criminal cases and the civil cases where a breach of the peace was alleged. It exercised also a control over the royal officers by means of the so-called prerogative writs which could issue from it alone. Finally it exercised an appellate jurisdiction to correct errors made by any of the judges or justices of the other tribunals, with some exceptions in the case of the Exchequer.

By Edward's time this process of division was complete, but the distinction of jurisdiction did not long remain clean-cut. Since the judges were paid out of fees of litigants in their courts, each court, imitating the method by which the King's Court had trespassed on the jurisdiction of the baronial and communal courts, sought to extend its own jurisdiction and bring into it parties seeking relief. As a result, jurisdiction in the ordinary civil cases came to exist in all three courts.

55. The legal profession. The development of the courts was paralleled by the development of the legal profession. Before Edward's reign had ended the practice of law had become virtually a professional monopoly, almost wholly in the hands of laymen. Professional pleaders argued the cases before the bar of the court. Professional attorneys conducted the legal business of clients outside the court

room. Men were apprenticed to the study of law as to a craft. When they had mastered its rudiments under the guidance of the older members of the bar, supervised, moreover, under royal order, by the judges, they were admitted to practice, and rewarded if especially and permanently successful with the title of serjeant or servant of the king's people. From the ranks of successful practitioners, rather than as in the older days from those of clerks trained in the various divisions of the king's courts, the judges were selected-men who had won their distinction by knowledge of the law and skill in dealing with it in practice. The results of this professionalizing of the administration of justice were both good and bad. On the one hand, the law was to be formulated by men whose training and experience were extensive, and moreover highly practical. The practitioners and the bench were sympathetic, and professional opinion could and did exercise a strong influence on the development of the law. On the other hand, the effect of this professional monopoly was to narrow and make highly technical the learning which constituted the preparation for practice.

A common lawyer need have no such knowledge of the canon law as the clerics of an earlier period possessed. The rules of the common law were best learned by studying the records of cases decided in the past, by observing the practice of the courts, the writs they allowed, the causes of action which might be included within the terms of these writs, and the rules governing the decisions made by the judges. To supplement and aid their memories, diligent stu