in the
kingdom."[3] From this dates the equality of Englishmen before the
law, commons as well as barons. Henry II was the first Norman king who
had the old Saxon blood, and therefore he was looked forward to with a
great deal of enthusiasm by the people of England. For although it is
only one hundred years after the Conquest, the Normans and the Saxons
had pretty well fused, and the Normans, who were inferior in number,
had got thoroughly imbued with the free notion of Anglo-Saxon law. So
they got this charter from him; but there is no legislation to concern
us in it, it is only political. It has a great deal to do with the
church, and with what the king will not do; it binds him, but it does
not state any law directly.

[Footnote 1: Stubbs's "Charters," p. 101 (clause 13).]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_., p. 108.]

[Footnote 3: _Ibid_., p. 135.]

There is further a continued evidence of the efforts of the people to
restore the common law of England as against the king's law or Roman
law, or later against the law of the church, also a kind of Roman law
known as canon law; and later still against the law of the king's
chancellor, what we should now call chancery jurisdiction; for the
jealousy of chancery procedure was quite as great in the twelfth
century as it is with the most radical labor leaders to-day; but of
this later on.

In 1159 they succeeded in doing away with the Norman method of trying
cases by battle and the Saxon method of trying by oath, and by the
machinery of the Norman Great Assize introduced again trial by jury.
For this in itself is probably an old Saxon institution. And in 1164
came the great Constitutions of Clarendon, the principal object of
which was to free the people from the church law and subject
the priests to the ordinary common law as in times before the
Conquest--for now, "as the influence of the Italian lawyers
increased,"[1] all the priests and clergy were above it. It was the
first great statute which clearly subjected the church--which, of
course, was the Church of Rome--to the common secular law. There was a
vast jurisdiction of church law ("Doctors commons" courts lasted until
a generation ago in England); some of it still remains. But in these
early days all matters concerning marriage, divorce, guardianship of
children, ownership of property after death, belonged to church law.
It is hard to see why, except that the mediaeval church arrogated
to itself anything that concerned _sin