This account of the relations of the two sets of courts would receive the support of recent writers, such as Maitland and Round, as well as of the older generation, such as Stubbs and Freeman. Mr. Frederic Seebohm may be mentioned as perhaps the most weighty upholder of the opposite view, which regards the manorial courts as of equally early or earlier origin than those of hundred and shire. ----- Practically every holder of land in England came to be also the holder of a court for the inhabitants of that land. The double meaning of the word “_dominus_” illustrates the double position of the man who was thus both owner and lord.[141] In the struggle between two schemes of justice, the tribunals of the feudal magnates easily triumphed, but never absolutely abolished their rivals. The earlier popular courts still lived on; but the system of district justice which had once embraced the whole of England was completely honeycombed by the growth of the feudal courts. As each once-free village passed under the domination of a lord, and gradually became a manor or embryo-manor, the village-moot (with such rudimentary authority as it may originally have possessed) gave way before a new manorial court endowed with much wider powers and with more effective sanction for enforcing them. Further, as complete hundreds fell under the control of specially powerful magnates, the entire courts of these hundreds were replaced by or transformed into feudal courts; franchises thus took the place of many of the old popular moots. Still, the older system retained possession of part of the disputed ground, thanks to the protection given it in its hour of need by the Crown. A great majority of the hundreds never bowed to the exclusive domination of any one lord, and the courts of the shires were jealously guarded by the Norman Kings against the encroachment of even the most powerful of barons. It is true that they only escaped subjection to a local landowner in order to fall under the more powerful domination of the Crown. Yet the mere fact that they continued in existence acted at least as a check on the growth of the rival system of seignorial tribunals. ----- Footnote 141: Cf. “landlord.” ----- Although it was the policy of the Norman Kings to prevent their barons from gaining excessive powers of jurisdiction, it was by no means their policy to oppose these jurisdictions altogether. On the contrary, the Conqueror and his sons were glad that order should be enforced and justice administered, even in a rough-and-ready manner, in those districts of England whither the Crown’s arm was not long enough to reach, and where the popular courts were likely to prove inefficient. Thus, the old system and the new existed side by side; it was to the interest of the central government to play off the one against the other.