not
used; accused persons were sent directly to the ordeal. In 1194,
twelve knights or legal men from each hundred answer before any
itinerant justice for their hundred in all criminal, civil, and
fiscal cases. All who are bound to attend before the itinerant
justices are, in the forest counties, compelled to attend the
forest courts.

The Royal Court was chiefly concerned with 1) the due regulation
and supervision of the conduct of local government, 2) the
ownership and possession of land held by free tenure ("free
tenement" was decided by justices to be one held for life or one
held heritably [a fee]), 3) the repression of serious crime, and
4) the relations between the lay and the ecclesiastical courts.

The doctrine of tenure applied universally to the land law formed
the basis for judicial procedure in determining land rights. Those
who held lands "in fee" from the king in turn subinfeudated their
land to men of lesser rank. The concept of tenure covered the
earl, the knight (knight's service), the church (frank-almoin
[free alms]), the tenant who performed labor services, and the
tenant who paid a rent (socage). Other tenures were: serjeanty
[providing an implement of war or performing a nonmilitary office]
and burgage. All hold the land of some lord and ultimately of the
King.

Henry was determined to protect lawful seisin of land and issued
assizes giving the Royal Court authority to decide land law issues
which had not been given justice in the county or lord's court.
But he did not ordain that all litigation respecting free
tenements, e.g. right of seisin, should take place in the king's
court. Rather he gave protection to mere possession of land, which
could be justified because possession was intimately associated
with the maintenance of the king's peace. These assizes included
issues of novel disseisin [recent ejectment] of a person's free
tenement or of his common of pasture which belonged to his
freehold. Though the petty assize of disseisin only provided a
swift preliminary action to protect possession pending the lengthy
and involved grand assize on the issue of which party had the more
just claim or ultimate right of seisin, the latter action was only
infrequently invoked. The temptation of a strong man to seize a
neighbor's land to reap its profits for a long time until the
neighbor could prove and enforce his right was deterred. Any such
claim of recent dispossession [novel disseisin] had to be