Following the beneficent policy, illustrated by the old Mosaic code, of bringing justice home to every man’s door, as nearly as may he, it was the general plan of Anglo-Saxon society, as designed and shaped by the great King Alfred and other early kings, to have such a system of courts as would speedily dispense justice to all the people, under the various conditions of society. Anglo-Saxon courts did not have the means of compelling obedience to their mandates for the majesty of the law was not the rule implicitly followed by all classes, in the beginning, but before many centuries, following King Alfred’s time, we find that it had become the fixed rule of life.[33] From the early _gemot_, of the Anglo-Saxon period, we soon find the regular county court and hundred court, where poor and rich alike were entitled to receive justice, without price and without delay.[34] The expeditious court of _piepoudre_, (the dusty foot court)—which dispensed justice as speedily as dust falls from the foot[35]—furnished speedy justice for small cases, while the _curia regis_, established by William the Conqueror, held in the royal palace, presided over by the king himself and his chief justiciar, with court barons, presided over by the lords of the realm, furnished, for many centuries a complete system of judiciture for the hearing of the ordinary causes in the realm.[36] The King was the fountain of justice and it was his business to see justice done, where the litigant failed to get his cause heard in the jurisdiction of his own hundred. Of course as a natural result of such a policy, the right of dispensing justice and receiving the profits thereof, under the Normans, soon became hereditary rights, passing to successive lords, whose judgments were supreme, unless the King himself ordered the entering of a certain judgment.[37] The Court of King’s Bench, the Court of Common Pleas and the High Court of Chancery, by gradual processes of time, succeeded to the principal places among the courts of later centuries, with the establishment by Henry II., A. D. 1176, of the _justices itinerant_, who divided the realm into six circuits and afterwards followed a fixed judicial system.[38] From the reign of William the Conqueror, until that of King John, the administration of Justice was still kept in the hands of the king, who was regarded as the source of all justice and law; after the conquest, the various prerogatives of the crown were increased and it was during this precarious state of the law that the subjects were obliged to purchase the favor of the sovereign, in order to obtain justice in the king’s courts.[39] So dependent upon the will of the sovereign was the tenure of the judge, during the reign of Richard I., that we find William de Longchamp, chief justiciary and chancellor, was removed from his office, by the intrigue of John, Earl of Morton, the king’s brother.[40]