other, the
Treasurer. The principal officials within the two comprised a single
body of men, sitting now as _justitiarii_, or justices, and now as
_barones_ of the Exchequer. The profits and costs of asserting and
administering justice and the incomings and outgoings of the Exchequer
were but different aspects of the same fundamental concerns of (p. 007)
state.[7] The justices of the Curia who held court on circuit
throughout the realm and the sheriffs who came up twice a year to
render to the barons of the Exchequer an account of the sums due from
the shires served as the real and tangible agencies through which the
central and local governments were knit together. As will appear, it
was from the Norman Curia that, in the course of time, there sprang
immediately those diversified departments of administration whose
heads comprise the actual executive of the British nation to-day.

[Footnote 7: Anson, Law and Custom of the
Constitution, II., Pt. I., II.]

*8. King and Great Council.*--Untrammelled by constitutional
restrictions, the Conqueror and his earlier successors recognized such
limitations only upon the royal authority as were imposed by powerful
and turbulent subjects. Associated with the king, however, was from
the first a body known as the _Commune Concilium_, the Common, or
Great, Council. "Thrice a year," the Saxon Chronicle tells us, "King
William wore his crown every year he was in England; at Easter he wore
it at Winchester; at Pentecost, at Westminster; and at Christmas, at
Gloucester; and at these times all the men of England were with
him--archbishops, bishops and abbots, earls, thegns and knights." By
the phrase "all the men of England" is to be understood only the great
ecclesiastics, the principal officers of state, and the king's
tenants-in-chief--in truth, only such of the more important of these
as were summoned individually to the sovereign's presence. At least in
theory, however, the Norman kings were accustomed to consult this
gathering of magnates, very much as their predecessors had been
accustomed to consult the witenagemot, upon all important questions of
legislation, finance, and public policy. It may, indeed, be said that
it is the development of this Council that comprises the central
subject of English constitutional history; for, "out of it, directly
or indirectly, by one process or another, have been evolved
Parliament, the Cabinet, and the