In normal circumstances, then, prior to the Angevin period, the King’s Court was merely a tribunal for transacting the king’s own business, or for holding pleas between the Crown’s own immediate tenants. Even from an early date, however, the business of the monarch, from the mere fact that he was lord paramount, was necessarily wider than the business of any mesne lord. In a dim way, too, it must have been apparent from the first, that offences against the established order were offences also against the king, and that, therefore, to redress these was the king’s business competent in the King’s Courts. Further, the Sovereign’s prerogative quickly waxed strong, and enabled him to give effect to his wishes in this as in other matters. The Crown asserted a right (while admitting no corresponding duty) to investigate any pleas of special importance, whether civil or criminal. Still, up to the Norman Conquest, and thereafter under William and his sons, royal justice had made no deliberate attempt to become national justice, or to supersede feudal justice. Each kept to its recognized province. The struggle between the two began only with the reforms of Henry II.[142] ----- Footnote 142: The various stages in the gradual process, extending from the reign of Henry I. to that of Edward I., by which royal justice insidiously encroached on feudal justice, may be studied in Professor Maitland’s admirably lucid account prefaced to _Sel. Pleas in Manorial Courts_, pp. liii. seq. See also Pollock and Maitland, I. 181-2. ----- Thus the three great systems of jurisdiction, popular justice, feudal justice, and royal justice (each depending on a different principle) succeeded each other, on the whole, in the order in which they are here named. Yet the sequence is in some ways logical rather than chronological. No absolute line can be drawn, showing where the supremacy of one principle ended and that of the next began. For centuries, all three co-existed, and struggled for the mastery. The germs of manorial jurisdiction may have been present from an early date. Shire-courts and hundred courts alike were continually in danger of falling under the domination of powerful local magnates. Yet the shire-courts were successful in maintaining till the last (thanks to royal favour) their independence of the manorial jurisdictions and their lords; while only a proportion of the hundred courts fell into bondage. The royal courts, again, exercised an important jurisdiction from the very foundation of the monarchy; and the king in person, or by deputy, from an early date, withdrew special causes from the County Courts, and also interfered with manorial franchises. Finally, the Courts Baron were never abolished, but only silently undermined by the policy of Henry II. and his successors, until they gradually sank into decrepitude without really ceasing to exist.