actor against the king's
officers; sheriffs were to give to the justices in writing the names of
all fugitives, so that they might be sought through all England;
everywhere jails, in which doubtful strangers or suspected rogues might
be shut up for safe keeping in case the "hue and cry" should be raised
after them, were to be made or repaired with wood from the king's or the
nearest landowner's domains; no man might entertain a stranger for whom
he would not be answerable before the justices; the old English law was
again repeated in the very words of ancient times, that none might take
into his house a waif or wanderer for more than one night unless he or
his horse were sick; and if he tarried longer he must be kept until he
were redeemed by his lord or could give safe pledges; no religious house
might receive any of the mean people into their body without good
testimony as to character unless he were sick unto death; and heretics
were to be treated as outlaws. These last indeed were not very plentiful
in England, and the over-anxious legislators seem only to have had in
view a little band of German preachers, who had converted one woman, and
who had themselves at a late council at Oxford been branded, flogged,
and driven out half-naked, so that there was by this time probably not
one who had not perished in the cold.

Such was the series of regulations that opened the long course of
reforms by which English law has been built up. Two judges were sent
during the next spring and summer through the whole of England. The
following year there was a survey of the forests, and in 1168 another
circuit of the shires was made by the barons of the Exchequer. Year by
year with unbroken regularity the terrible visitation of the country by
the justices went on. The wealth of the luckless people poured into the
king's treasury; the busy secretaries recorded in the Rolls a mass of
profits unknown to the accounts of earlier days. The great barons who
presided over the Shire courts found themselves practically robbed of
power and influence. The ordinary courts fell into insignificance beside
those summoned by the king's judges, thronged as they were with the
crowd of rich and poor, trembling at the penalty of a ruinous fine for
non-attendance or full of a newly-kindled hope of justice. Important
cases were more and more withdrawn from the sheriffs and given to the
justices. They entered the estates of the nobles, even the franchises,
l