"The county court is a court incident to the jurisdiction of the sheriff. It is not a court of record, but may hold pleas of debt, or damages, under the value of forty shillings; over some of which causes these inferior courts have, by the express words of the statute of Gloucester, (6 Edward I., eh. 8,) a jurisdicton totally exclusive of the king's superior courts. * * The county court may also hold plea of many real actions, and of all personal actions to any amount, by virtue of a special writ, called a justicies, which is a writ empowering the sheriff, for the sake of despatch, to do the samee justice in his county court as might otherwise be had at Westminster. The freeholders of the county court are the real judges in this court, and the sheriff is the ministerial ofhcer. * * In modern times, as proceedings are removable from hence into the king's superior courts, by writ of pone or recordari, in the same manner as from hundred courts and courts-baron, and as the same writ of false judgment may be had in nature of a writ of error, this has occasioned the same disuse of bringing actions therein." 3 Blackstone, 36, 37. "Upon the whole, we cannot but admire the wise economy and admirable provision of our ancestors in settling the distribution of justice in a method so well calculated for cheapness, expedition, and ease. By the constitution which they established, all trivial debts, and injuries of small consequence, were to be recovered or redressed in every man's own county, hundred, or perhaps parish." 3 Blackstone, 59. [22] It would be wholly erroneous, I think, to infer from this statement of Stuart, that either the "priests, princes, earls, or eorldormen" exercised any authority over the jury in the trial of causes, in the way of dictating the law to them. Henry's account of this matter doubtless gives a much more accurate representation of the truth. He says that anciently [23] There was no distinction between the civil and criminal courts, as to the rights or powers of juries. [24] This quaint and curious book; (Smith's Commonwealth of England) describes the minutiae of trials, giving in detail the mode of impaneling the jury and then the conduct of the lawyers, witnesses, and court I give the following extracts, tending to show that the judges impose no law upon the juries, in either civil or criminal cases but only require them to determine the causes according to their consciences. In civil causes he says: