What is true of the Saxon and Norman times holds good for a somewhat later period. At Ashburton, Devonshire, the annual courts of the manorial lord met in the chapel of St Laurence, when such officials as the bailiff and the port-reeve were elected[324]. The court leet, which, under the feudal system, was charged with maintenance of the peace, and which had jurisdiction over petty offences, frequently, as at Bolton, assembled in church[325]. The Courts of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports also met in a consecrated building[326]. Sometimes the business to be transacted was of a trivial kind. At Alvingham, Lincolnshire, “the Commune of the servants of the Ladye Nicholas,” or their “baylifes,” are bidden to meet in the adjacent church of St Leonard, Cockerington, to appoint a day for mowing grass in their common pasture[327]. But whether the matters to be considered were light or weighty, the church seemed to be the natural building for such gatherings. Hence, when Mr A. C. Benson, in one of his delightful essays, speaks of the “great cruciform structures” of the Fens, “built with no idea of prudent proportion to the needs of the places they serve,” he does not take a comprehensive view of local requirements. The course of events just sketched might have been anticipated. Meetings in the open-air having been discontinued, where were the folk to meet in council? There was a poverty of suitable buildings. Long ago Fergusson remarked on “the almost entire absence of municipal buildings during the whole of the Middle Ages[328].” The short list of notable examples which he was able to bring forward served to make the general absence more striking. A few guild halls and town halls make up the catalogue for the cities; the smaller towns have little to show of this kind. There is consequently a basis for the belief, expressed by some writers[329], that the use of churches as courts of justice was “universal in feudal England.” The assertion is doubtless too general, but, if for the word “universal,” we read “widespread,” it would be quite correct. The case of St Nicholas, Newcastle--a church to which allusion has already been made (p. 131 _supra_)--supplies a noteworthy example of this usage. For centuries the burgesses met in that church for public business. In the tower hung a bell, known as the “common bell,” which was tolled on these occasions. Three times a year it also summoned the freemen to their guild meetings, when a sermon was preached by the Lord Mayor. This bell had another name, “the thief and reever bell” (_reever_ = freebooter, cattle-robber); tradition says that it announced the holding of fairs, and gave warning to drovers and dealers that no inconvenient questions would be asked concerning the beasts which they had for sale[330].