Courts of Common Law is primarily concerned with suits which affect the royal revenue. Such was the English scheme of administration, and _mutatis mutandis_ it was reproduced in France. Here the royal demesne, small in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was enormously enlarged by the annexations of Philip Augustus and the later Capets, who brought under their immediate control the larger part of the Angevin inheritance, the great fiefs of Toulouse and Champagne, and many smaller territories. To provide for the government of these acquisitions, there was built up, in the course of the thirteenth century, an administrative hierarchy consisting of provosts, who correspond to the bailiffs of English hundreds, of _baillis_ and _senechaux_ who resemble the English sheriffs, of _enqueteurs_ who perambulate the demesne making inspections and holding sessions in the same manner as the English Justices in Eyre. All these functionaries are controlled, from the time of St. Louis, by the _Chambre des Comptes_ and the _Parlement_, the one a fiscal department, the other a supreme court of first instance and appeal. Within the _Parlement_ there is a distinction between the Courts of Common Law and the _Chambre des Reqeutes_ which deals with petitions by the rules of Equity. The vices of both systems were the same. The local officials were too powerful within their respective spheres; neither inspectors nor royal courts proved adequate as safeguards against corruption and abuses of authority, which were the more frequent because the vicious expedients of farming and selling offices had become an established practice. Otherwise the English system was superior to that of France, particularly in making use for certain purposes of local representatives as an additional check upon the servants of the Crown. The English shire was in fact as well as in law a community with a true corporate character (_communitas_), and possessed a public assembly which was a law court and a local parliament in one. Though the ordinary suitor counted for little, the secondary landowners, united by ties of local sentiment and personal relationship, took a lively interest and an active share in the business of the shire court, upholding the local custom against sheriffs and judges, serving as jurors, as assessors of taxes, as guardians of the peace, and (from the fourteenth century) as petty magistrates. Whether elected by their fellows or the nominees of the Crown, these functionaries were unpaid, and regarded themselves as the defenders of local liberty against official usurpations. In France the district of the _bailli_, and still more that of his subordinate the _prevot_, was an arbitrary creation, without natural unity or corporate sentiment; there was therefore no organised resistance to executive authority, and no reason why the Crown should court the goodwill of the landed gentry. In the lower grades of the Plantagenet system a powerful