In the ordinances of his household, Edward II enumerates and deplores all these abuses; he orders that masterless men who follow the Court shall be put in irons for forty days on bread and water, and that the women of ill life shall be likewise imprisoned and branded with a {111} hot iron; he forbids his knights, clerks, squires, valets, grooms, in short, all who accompany him, to bring their wives with them, unless these have any post or employment at Court, this host of feminine beings increasing the chances of trouble. He also limits the number of persons who should accompany the marshal, which had, as will happen, increased little by little beyond all bounds. His ordinances, like so many others in the Middle Ages, were conspicuous for their wisdom, their minuteness, and their prompt decay. Justice did not travel only in the king’s suite. She was peripatetic in England, visiting the counties in the company of the royal itinerant judges and going from hundred to hundred with that governor, military chief, police magistrate, financial agent, the sheriff, a functionary of great local, and sometimes tyrannical, power, appointed and dismissed at will by the king during certain periods, elected at others. Both kinds, at fixed times, were on the move and caused a considerable portion of the inhabitants to leave their work, take to the road and be on the move too, in order to come to the court that was to be held. Both kinds put before the jurors a number of questions which the twelve men had to answer under oath, some of those questions being obviously quite uncomfortable to reply to. The sheriff goes about the hundreds[107] in his shire and holds the “view of frank pledge,” chiefly established for the maintenance of that ancient system of enforced solidarity which obliged, theoretically at least, every male {112} to belong to a particular group of inhabitants of ten or more (tithing), jointly responsible for the misdeeds of any of their number in case the culprit cannot be found, fined, jailed or hanged, according to the occasion. By degrees the old “articles of the view,” greatly varying from place to place,[108] had increased in number, and the jurors had to answer as to a variety of smaller offences often duplicating the justices’ own interrogatories.[109] The “turns” or “tourns” of the sheriffs might, according to the Great Charter, only take place twice a year, not oftener, because their coming occasioned loss of time and money to the sworn men and others who had to leave home and attend the court, and to the king’s subjects at whose houses these officers and their train went to lodge.[110] In spite of institutions which, as we shall see, had made the very men placed under the jurisdiction of the sheriffs, bailiffs, etc. themselves the censors of these same officials, abuses were numerous, the Commons were ever complaining, and frequent statutes, one after the other, denounced corrupt practices and stopped them—for a time.[111] {113}