[2] "The people, who in every general council or assembly could oppose and dethrone their sovereigns, were in little dread of their encroachments on their liberties; and kings, who found sufficient employment in keeping possession of their crowns, would not likely attack the more important privileges of their subjects."
[3] This office was afterwards committed to sheriffs. But even while the court was held by the lord, "the Lord was not judge, but the Pares (peers) only." Gilbert on the Court of Exchequer, 61-2.
[4] The opinion expressed in the text, that the Witan had no legislative authority, is corroborated by the following authorities:
"From the fact that the new laws passed by the king and the Witan were laid before the shire-mote, (county court,) we should be almost justified in the inference that a second sanction was necessary before they could have the effect of law in that particular county." Durham's Middle Ages, Sec. 2, B. 2, Ch. l. 57 Lardner's Cab. Cyc., 53.
The "second sanction" required to give the legislation of the king and Witan the effect of law, was undoubtedly, I think, as a general thing, the sanction of a jury. I know of no evidence whatever that laws were ever submitted to popular vote in the county courts, as this author seems to suppose possible. Another mode, sometimes resorted to for obtaining the sanction of the people to the laws of the Witan, was, it seems, to persuade the people themselves to swear to observe them. Mackintoshsays:
"The preambles of the laws (of the Witan) speak of the infinite number of liegemen who attended, as only applauding the measures of the assembly. But this applause was neither so unimportant to the success of the measures, nor so precisely distinguished from a share in legislation, as those who read history with a modern eye might imagine. It appears that under Athelstan expedients were resorted to, to obtain a consent to the law from great bodies of the people in their districts, which their numbers rendered impossible in a national assembly. That monarch appears to have sent commissioners to hold shire-gemotes or county meetings, where they proclaimed the laws made by the king and his counsellors, which, being acknowledged and sworn to at these folk-motes (meetings of the people) became, by their assent, completely binding on the whole nation." Mackintosh's Hist. of England, Ch. 2. 45 Lardner's Cab. Cc., 75.
[5] Page 31.
[6] Hallam says, "It was, however, to the county court that an English freeman chiefly looked for the maintenance of his civil rights." 2 Middle Ages, 392.
Also, "This (the county court) was the great constitutional judicature in all ques- tions of civil right." Ditto, 395. Also, "The liberties of these Anglo-Saxon thanes were chiefly secured, next to their swords and their free spirits, by the inestimable right of deciding civil and criminal suits in their own county courts." Ditto, 899.
[7] "Alfred may, in one sense, be called the founder of these laws, (the Saxon,) for until his time they were an unwrittencode, but he expressly says, 'that I, Alfred, collected the good laws of our forefathers into one code, and also I wrote them down' — which is a decisive fact in the history of our laws well worth noting." Introduction to Gilbert's History of the Common Pleas, p. 2, note.