Nor was there for the mass of the people any real help or security to be
found in an appeal to the supreme tribunal of the realm where the king
sat in council with his ministers. This still remained a tribunal of
exceptional resort to which appeals were rare. There was one Richard
Anesty, who, in these first years of Henry's reign, desired to prove in
the King's Court his right to hold a certain property. For five years
Richard, his brother, and a multitude of helpers, were incessantly busied
in this arduous task. The court followed the king, and the king might be
anywhere from York to the Garonne. The unhappy suitor might well have
joined in a complaint once made by a secretary of Henry in search of his
master: "Solomon saith there be three things difficult to be found out,
and a fourth which may hardly be discovered: the way of an eagle in the
air; the way of a ship in the sea; the way of a serpent on the ground;
and the way of a man in his youth. I can add a fifth: the way of a king
in England." The whole business now done by post had then to be carried
on by laborious journeyings, in which we hear again and again that horses
died on the road; if a writ were needed from king or queen, if the royal
seal were required, or a certificate from a bishop, or a letter from an
archbishop, special messengers posted across country; then the writ must
be carried in the same way to York, Lincoln, or elsewhere to be examined
by some famous lawyer, sometimes an Italian learned in the last legal
fashions of the day; perhaps it was pronounced faulty, or it might be
that the seal of justiciar or archbishop was refused on its return from
the lawyer, and the same business had to begin all over again; twice
messengers had to be sent to Rome, the journey each way taking at least
forty days of incessant and dangerous travelling. When at last the
appointed day for judgment by the justiciar came, friends, helpers, and
witnesses had to be called together in the same laborious way, and
transported at great cost to the place of trial, and there kept waiting
till news was brought that the plea could not then be heard; and thus
again and again the luckless suitor was summoned, each time to a
different town in England. In every town he was forced by his necessities
to borrow money from some Jew, who demanded about eighty-seven per cent
for the loan; and when at last, as Richard was worn out with the delays
of justiciars, Henry appeared on the scene