In the seven years which followed the suppression of the barons’ revolt Henry’s prosperity reached its height. The rising in which all his enemies had united for his destruction had ended in leaving him seated more firmly than ever upon the most securely-established throne in Europe. Within the four seas of Britain he was master as no king had ever been master before him. The English people had been with him from the first, and was learning year by year to identify its interests more closely with his; the Church, alienated for nearly ten years, was reconciled by his penance; feudalism was beaten at last, and for ever. The Welsh princes were his obedient and serviceable vassals; the Scot king had been humbled to accept a like position; a new subject-realm was growing up on the coast of Ireland. The great external peril which had dogged Henry’s footsteps through life, the hostility of France, was for a while paralyzed by his success. Other external foes he had none; the kings of Spain and of Sicily, the princes of the Western and even of the Eastern Empire, vied with each other in seeking the friendship, one might almost say the patronage, of the one sovereign in Europe who, safe on his sea-girt throne, could afford to be independent of them all. Within and without, on either side of the sea, all hindrances to the full and free developement of Henry’s policy for the government of his whole dominions were thus completely removed.

In England itself the succeeding period was one of unbroken tranquillity and steady prosperous growth, social, intellectual, political, constitutional. Henry used his opportunity to make a longer stay in the island than he had ever made there before, save at the very beginning of his reign. He was there from May 1175 to August 1177; in the following July he returned, and stayed till April 1180; he came back again in July 1181, and remained till March 1182. Each of these visits was marked by some further step towards the completion of his judicial and administrative reforms. Almost as soon as he set foot in the country, indeed, he took up his work as if it had never been interrupted. The king and his eldest son went to England together on May 9, 1175;[842] on Rogation Sunday they publicly sealed their reconciliation with each other and with the Church in a great council which met at Westminster[843] under the presidence of a new archbishop of Canterbury, Richard, formerly prior of Dover, who after countless troubles and delays had been chosen just before the outbreak of the rebellion to fill S. Thomas’s place,[844] and had come back from Rome in triumph, with his pallium and a commission as legate for all England, just as Henry was returning to Normandy from his success against Hugh Bigod.[845] From the council the two kings and the primate went all together on a pilgrimage to the martyr’s tomb at Canterbury;[846] at Whitsuntide the kings held a court at Reading,[847] and on S. Peter’s day they met the Welsh princes in a great council at Gloucester.[848] Two days later the process, begun two years before, of filling up the vacant bishoprics and abbacies which had been accumulating during Thomas’s exile was completed in another council at Woodstock.[849] Thence, too, was issued an edict for the better securing of order throughout the realm, and particularly around the person of the king; all his opponents in the late war were forbidden, on pain of arrest as traitors, to come to the court without special summons, and, under any circumstances, to come before sunrise or stay over night; and all wearing of arms, knife, bow and arrows, was forbidden on the English side of the Severn. These prohibitions however were only temporary;[850] and they were, with one exception, the only measure of general severity taken by Henry in consequence of the rebellion. That exception was a great forest-visitation, begun by Henry in person during the summer of 1175 and not completed by his ministers, it seems, till Michaelmas 1177, and from which scarcely a man throughout the kingdom, baron or villein, layman or priest, was altogether exempt. In vain did Richard de Lucy, as loyal to the people as to the king, shew Henry his own royal writ authorizing the justiciars to throw open the forests and give up the royal fish-ponds to public use during the war, and protest against the injustice of punishing the people at large for a trespass to which he had himself invited them in the king’s name and in accordance, as he had understood it, with the king’s expressed will. The license had probably been used to a far wider extent than Henry had intended; the general excitement had perhaps vented itself in some such outburst of wanton destructiveness as had occurred after the death of Henry I.; at any rate, the Norman and the Angevin blood in Henry II. was all alike stirred into wrath at sight of damage done to vert and venison; the transgressors were placed, in technical phrase, “at the king’s mercy,” and their fines constituted an important item in the Pipe Roll of 1176.[851]

In the beginning of that year the king assembled a great council at Northampton,[852] and thence issued an Assize which forms another link in the series of legal enactments begun at Clarendon just ten years before. The first three clauses and the twelfth clause of the Assize of Northampton are substantially a re-issue of those articles of the Assize of Clarendon which regulated the presentment, detention and punishment of criminals and the treatment of strangers and vagabonds.[853] The experience of the past ten years had however led to some modifications in the details of the procedure. The recognition by twelve lawful men of every hundred and four of every township, to be followed by ordeal of water, was re-enacted; but the presentment was now to be made not to the sheriff, but direct to the king’s justices. The punishments, too, were more severe than before; the forger, robber, murderer or incendiary who under the former system would have suffered the loss of a foot was now to lose a hand as well, and to quit the realm within forty days.[854] The remaining articles dealt with quite other matters. The fourth declared the legal order of proceeding with regard to the estate of a deceased freeholder, in such a manner as to secure the rights of his heir and of his widow before the usual relief could be exacted by the lord; and it referred all disputes between the lord and the heir touching the latter’s right of inheritance to the decision of the king’s justices, on the recognition of twelve lawful men[855]—a process which, under the name of the assize of mort d’ancester, soon became a regular part of the business transacted before the justices-in-eyre. Some of the other clauses had a more political significance. They directed the justices to take an oath of homage and fealty to the king from every man in the realm, earl, baron, knight, freeholder or villein, before the octave of Whit-Sunday at latest, and to arrest as traitors all who refused it:[856]—to investigate and strictly enforce the demolition of the condemned castles;[857] to ascertain and report by whom, how and where the duty of castle-guard was owed to the king;[858] to inquire what persons had fled from justice and incurred the penalty of outlawry by failing to give themselves up at the appointed time, and to send in a list of all such persons to the Exchequer at Easter and Michaelmas for transmission to the king.[859] The tenth article was aimed at the bailiffs of the royal demesnes, requiring them to give an account of their stewardship before the Exchequer;[860] and two others defined the justices’ authority, as extending, in judicial matters, over all pleas of the Crown, both in criminal causes and in civil actions concerning half a knight’s fee or less; and in fiscal matters, over escheats, wardships, and lands and churches in royal demesne.[861]

The visitations of the justices by whom this assize was carried into effect were arranged upon a new plan, or rather upon a modified form of the plan which had been adopted two years before for the assessment of a tallage upon the royal demesnes, to meet the cost of the expected war. It was at that terrible crisis, when most men in Henry’s place would have had no thought to spare for anything save the military necessities and perils of the moment, that he had first devised and carried into effect the principle of judicial circuits which with some slight changes in detail has remained in force until our own day. This tallage was levied by nineteen barons of the Exchequer, distributed into six companies, each company undertaking the assessment throughout a certain district or group of shires.[862] The abandonment of this scheme in the assizes of the two following years was probably necessitated by the disturbed state of the country. But at the council of Northampton the kingdom was again definitely mapped out into six divisions, to each of which three justices were sent.[863] In the report of their proceedings in the Pipe Roll of the year they are for the first time since the Assize of Clarendon[864] officially described by the title which they had long borne in common speech, “justitiæ itinerantes” (or “errantes”), justices-in-eyre; and it is from this time that the regular institution of itinerant judges is dated by modern legal historians.[865]

This first distribution of circuits however was soon altered. In the very next year the same eighteen officers made, in addition to their judicial circuits, a general visitation of the realm for fiscal purposes, in four companies instead of six;[866] and on Henry’s return to England in the summer of 1178 he made what at first glance looks like a sweeping change in the organization of the Curia Regis. “The king,” we are told, “made inquiry concerning his justices whom he had appointed in England, whether they treated the men of the realm with righteousness and moderation; and when he learned that the country and the people were sore oppressed by the great multitude of justices—for they were eighteen in number—by the counsel of the wise men of the realm he chose out five, two clerks and three laymen, who were all of his private household; and he decreed that those five should hear all the complaints of the realm, and do right, and that they should not depart from the king’s court, but abide there to hear the complaints of his men; so that if any question came up among them which they could not bring to an end, it should be presented to the king’s hearing and determined as might please him and the wise men of the realm.”[867] From the mention of the number eighteen it appears that the persons against whom were primarily directed both the complaint of the people and the action of the king were the justices-in-eyre of the last two years; and this is confirmed by the fact that of all these eighteen, only six were among the judges who went on circuit in 1178 and 1179, while from 1180 onwards only one of them reappears in that capacity, though many of them retained their functions in the Exchequer. In 1178 and 1179 moreover the circuits were reduced from six to two, each being served by four judges.[868] The enactment of 1178, however, evidently touched the central as well as the provincial judicature, and with more important results. It took the exercise of the highest judicial functions out of the hands of the large body of officers who made up the Curia Regis as constituted until that time, and restricted it to a small chosen committee. This was apparently the origin of a limited tribunal which, springing up thus within the Curia Regis, soon afterwards appropriated its name, and in later days grew into the Court of King’s Bench. At the same time the reservation of difficult cases for the hearing of the king in council points to the creation, or rather to the revival, of a yet higher court of justice, that of the king himself in council with his “wise men”—a phrase which, while on the one hand it carries us back to the very earliest form of the Curia Regis, on the other points onward to its later developements in the modern tribunals of equity or of appeal, the courts of Chancery and of the Privy Council in its judicial capacity.[869]