[584] On the date see Bishop Stubbs’ preface to _Gesta Hen._, vol. ii. pp. lix.–lxi. The Assize is printed in an appendix to same preface, pp. cxlix–cliv, and in _Select Charters_, pp. 143–146. [585] Assize of Clarendon, c. 1 (Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 143). [586] Glanville, _De legibus Angliæ_, l. ii. c. 7 (_ib._ p. 161). Cf. Stubbs, _Constit. Hist._, vol. i. p. 616. [587] Constit. Clar. c. 9 (Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 139). See above, pp. 26, 27. [588] Assize Clar. cc. 1, 2, 4, 6 (as above, pp. 143, 144). [589] _Ib._ c. 8 (p. 144). [590] _Ib._ cc. 9–11 (as above). As was the case with most of Henry’s reforms, none of the methods of procedure adopted in this Assize were new inventions. Not only had the inquest by sworn recognitors been in use for civil purposes ever since the Norman conquest; it may even be that the germ of a jury of presentment in criminal cases, which in its modern shape appears for the first time in the Assize of Clarendon, is to be traced yet further back, to an ordinance of Æthelred II., whereby the twelve senior thegns in every wapentake were made to swear that they would “accuse no innocent man nor conceal any guilty one.”[591] The mission of itinerant justices--derived in principle from the early days of English kingship, when the sovereign himself perambulated his whole realm, hearing and deciding whatever cause came before him as he passed along--had been employed by Henry I., and revived by Henry II. immediately after his accession. A visitation of the greater part of England had been made by two of the chief officers of the Curia Regis in the first year of his reign, and again in the second; another circuit seems to have been made in 1159 by William Fitz-John; and in 1163 Alan de Neville held pleas of the forest in Oxfordshire, while the justiciar himself, Richard de Lucy, made a journey into Cumberland to hold the pleas of the Crown there, for the first time since the district had passed into the hands of the king of Scots.[592] From the date of the Assize of Clarendon, however, these journeys became regular and general,[593] and the work of the judges employed on them became far more extensive and important. [591] Laws of Æthelred II., l. iii. c. 3 (Stubbs, _Select Charters_, p. 72). See Stubbs, _Constit. Hist._, vol. i. pp. 103, 115, 396, 611, 614. [592] Stubbs, _Gesta Hen._, vol. ii., pref. p. lxiv. [593] _Ib._ pp. lxiii, lxiv.