The principle of his reform was, to make every man answerable to an immediate superior for his personal conduct, and that of his neighbourhood. For this purpose, England was divided into tithings and hundreds, and perhaps into counties, all being under a supreme magistrate—the king. He also collected into a volume all the customs of the various districts, which he issued for the guidance of the several country courts. Those in their turn were liable to account to the king’s courts, which were kept in the royal household, and which travelled with this great king, whose life seems to have been chiefly occupied in traversing the kingdom as high minister of law, and teaching its principles to his people. The Danish invasions shook this code, but had not the power to crush it. It was renewed by King Edgar, a man of vigour and talents. The digest was completed by his grandson, Edward the Confessor—the whole forming the common law, or law _common_ to the whole realm. The principles of the Saxon law, which were the principles of their fathers in the German forests, and were the principles of truth and nature, were briefly these:—The establishment of the Wittena-gemote, or assembly of wise men—a species of parliament, without which no new law could be made, or old one changed; the election of all magistrates by the people; the hereditary descent of the crown; the commutation of capital punishments, on the first offence, for a fine; military service in proportion to land; forfeiture of land for treason, but _not_ corruption of blood; the descent of lands to all the male’s equally, without right of primogeniture, (a rule unworthy of Saxon wisdom;) the use of county courts in ordinary cases, with courts held before the king in the higher; last, and most important of all, trial by jury (though trial was also held by ordeal.) Of those principles, some were evidently unfit for subsequent civilisation; and some refined themselves. But the whole system, when compared with the old Roman code, and with many of the codes of Europe which followed it, exhibits an extraordinary evidence of the manliness of feeling, and justness of conception, existing among the Saxon ancestry of England. In the eleventh century, the Norman Conquest burst in upon the country with the force of an inundation, and swept before it throne, liberty, and _laws_. The influence of Rome now began to act powerfully on the people. Ecclesiastical courts were formed, separate from the civil, and the Romish priesthood were gradually exempted from the secular power.