of the monarchy, the succession of these officers can be deduced from Clovis, the patrician king; and we find an officer bearing this title in the charters of Ethelbert. In the reign of the Confessor, the assumption of the great seal, as the means of declaring the King's intention, has been alEarly stage, ready noticed; and, under the Conqueror, the need of employing secretaries for the many purposes with which the King had hitherto dealt, viva voce, greatly encreased both the powers and the influence of the King's chapel, as this department was called. Those who are denominated the King's chaplains were the writing clerks constituting the Board, of which the Chancellor was the head. This officer may be termed the Secretary of State for all departments, and thus he continued during many generations, until his functions were gradually subdivided amongst the other officers of state, by whom they are now exercised. That such an office could alone be entrusted to an ecclesiastic, was a matter of course; and Arfastus, afterwards Bishop of Thetford, held it at a very early period of the Conqueror's reign. It issues writs. From this department emanated the gewrits, or letters, by which the Sovereign intimated his intentions; and those relating to the administration of remedial justice, constituted a large, and to the people in general, the most important portion. Varied as they were at first in form, according to the circumstances of each case, they are all grounded upon one principle-that right was to be done, lest further complaint of an unredressed grievance, should again reach the throne. The principle upon which they issued was a combination, so to speak, of an exertion of the King's grace and favour, united to his obligation of dispensing justice. What the King granted, he might withhold, either because the complaint was too unfounded or trivial to require the interposition of the supreme authority; or because the obscurity of the complainant or the influence of the defendant, or party accused, might stay the course of law. a subjects' court. precedents. How often either of these causes might It becomes operate, cannot be here discussed; but one point was gained. There was a regular office, to use the common phrase, to which the suitor might apply, and a regular body of officials, by whom the first process for obtaining justice could be issued. These officials, for their own It convenience, would begin to collect something like a body of precedents, and hereby the first foundation was laid for a regular system of jurisprudence. The greater portion of our antient writs consist of the principles of the AngloSaxon law, embodied in an Anglo-Norman form; and, finding, as we do, the same forms first employed in England, and subsequently in Normandy, at least so far as can be ascertained from any evidence hitherto collected by archæological industry, are we not warranted in the Result of the law. Regent Justiciars. 618 ESTABLISHMENT OF JUSTICIARS. inference that it was the King of England who introduced into Normandy the usages which were common to both realms? 12. Whilst William's want of knowledge of absences on the English language occasioned this great alteration in the formal method of dispensing remedial justice, a still greater change took place in consequence of the repeated absences of the Sovereign and his successors, from the island realm. At least more than half the time of days and months and years of the reign of William and his children, nay even till the final loss of the duchy, was passed beyond the seas. During these absences, it became needful to delegate the royal authority: it was put in commission, and entrusted to various regents; but so prominent was the judicial character of the Sovereign, that these regents were always called Justiciars: it was not for the purpose of coercing his English subjects, for coercion might have been effected by the sword, but for the purpose of administering justice to them, that the Sovereign's place was to be supplied; and hence, so permanent has been our course of usage, that, in the event of the Sovereign's absence from England, her representatives would be called Lords Justices at the present day. These justices were probably more accessible to the people than the one person of the Sovereign; and, inasmuch as it seems to have been considered that the remedial jurisdiction of the English King was inherent in the SPIRIT OF THE CONSTITUTION. 619 crown, it became the usage to appoint Justiciars for the exercise of those functions of justice, which, even when royalty became more settled, were growing too burthensome for the ordinary leisure of the throne. General results of the Conquest on the constitution. 13. In considering the progress of the English Government, we must, in the first place, endeavour to distinguish very carefully between the form and the spirit; not by any means attempting unwisely to depreciate the mode and manner by which our Constitution has been administered, or to slight, or to revile any institution which commands popular respect, even though that respect may, in some degree, result from misapplied appreciation of the importance of its object; not, on the other hand, attaching a bigotted or overweening importance to one principle, so as to neglect all countervailing influences, the danger to which political theorists, of all others, are most generally exposed. The English Constitution is not based so much upon liberty as upon law; it is the glory of our law to secure the liberty of the subject; yet the subject should value his liberty only to obtain the protection of the law. Let not our Par- Real liament be considered as a Congress, a Political Assembly, but as a Tribunal, in which, whatever the question may be, the vote of the member is the exercise of his functions as a judge; a judge protecting his fellow-subjects—a judge advising the Sovereign-a judge, if need be, be intention of Parliament. Strictly legal character of ment. 620 LEGAL GROWTH OF THE CONSTITUTION. tween the subject and the Sovereign. Whatever abuses may have existed, whatever wrongs may have been perpetrated under the name of right, whatever selfishness may have been disguised under the garb of patriotism, whatever unconscientiousness may have been exhibited by individuals or parties, this, and no other, has been the theory of all our conflicts and revolutions. Ours has not been a rude contest for the its develop assertion of independence, but an attempt to obtain an adjudication upon our rights, a case, an adjudication, a precedent. We have never, hitherto, contended for abstract rights or for general principles; our Constitution has never yet degenerated into a charter of maxims and definitions, divided into chapters and articles, but it has resulted from definite remedies applied to definite grievances; and when it ceases to be so, our empire will complete its fall. William reigns by law; ? 14. As William the Conqueror assumed the royal power, as the lawful successor of Edward the Confessor, it followed, as a natural consequence, that he would support his own authority by respecting Edward the Confessor's law; this constituted what we may term the technical principle of his government. Every prescriptive right was to be held as it had been in the days of the Confessor: the laws of Edward the Confessor were to be observed in all respects except so far as he had caused them to be amended for |