"The County Court is a court incident to the jurisdiction of the sheriff. * * The freeholders of the county are the real judges in this court, and the sheriff is the ministerial officer." 3 Stephens, 395 6. 3 Blackstone, 35-6.
Blackstone describes these courts, as courts "wherein injuries were redressed in an easy and expeditious manner, by the suffrage of neighbors and friends." 3 Blackstone, 30.
"When we read of a certain number of freemen chosen by the parties to decide in a dispute all bound by oath to vote in foro conscientia and that their decision, not the will of the judge presiding, ended the suit, we at once perceive that a great improvement has been made in the old form of compurgation an improvement which impartial observation can have no hesitation to pronounce as identical in its main features with the trial by jury." Dunham's Middle Ages, Sec. 2, B. 2, Ch. 1. 57 Lardner's Cab. Cyc., 60.
"The bishop and the earl or, in his absence, the gerefa, (sheriff,) and sometimes both the earl and the gerefa, presided at the schyre-mote (county court); the gerefa (sheriff) usually alone presided at the mote (meeting or court) of the hundred. In the cities and towns which were not within any peculiar jurisdiction, there was held, at regular stated intervals, a burgh mote, (borough court,) for the administration of justice, at which a gerefa, or a magistrate appointed by the king, presided." Spence's Origin of the Laws and Political Institutions of Modern Europe, p. 444.
"The right of the plaintiff and defendant, and of the prosecutor and criminal, to challenge the judices, (judges.) or assessors, [17] appointed to try the cause in civil matters, and to decide upon the guilt or innocence of the accused in criminal matters, is recognized in the treatise called the Laws of Henry the First; but I cannot discover, from the Anglo-Saxon laws or histories, that before the Conquest the parties had any general right of challege; indeed, had such right existed, the injunctions to all persons standing in the situation of judges (jurors) to do right according to their conscience, would scarcely have been so frequently and anxiously repeated." Spence, 456.
Hale says:
"The administration of the common justice of the kingdom seems to be wholly dispensed in the county courts, hundred courts, and courts-baron; except some of the greater crimes reformed by the laws of King Henry I., and that part thereof which was sometimes taken up by the Justitiarius Angliae.
This doubtless bred great inconvenience, uncertainty, and variety in the laws, viz.:
"First, by the ignorance of the judges, which were the freeholders of the county.* *
"Thirdly, a third inconvenience was, that all the business of any moment was carried by parties and factions. For the freeholders being generally the judges, and conversing one among another, and being as it were the chief judges, not only of the fact, but of the law; every man that had a suit there, sped according as he could make parties." 1 Hale's History of the Common Law, p. 246.