These experts had a free hand as regards the law they administered. The old Anglo-Saxon customs which had done duty for law had degenerated into antiquated formalities, varying in almost every shire and hundred, which were perforce ignored by Henry's judges because they were incomprehensible. So much as they understood and approved they blended with principles drawn from the revived study of Roman law and with Frankish and Norman customs. The legal rules thus elaborated by the king's court were applied by the justices in eyre where-ever their circuits took them, and became in time the common law of England, common because it admitted no local bars and no provincial prejudices. One great stride had been taken in the making of the English nation, when the king's court, trespassing upon local popular and feudal jurisdiction, dumped upon the Anglo-Saxon market the following among other foreign legal concepts--assize, circuit, suit, plaintiff, defendant, maintenance, livery, possession, property, probate, recovery, trespass, treason, felony, fine, coroner, court, inquest, judge, jury, justice, verdict, taxation, charter, liberty, representation, parliament, and constitution. It is difficult to over- estimate the debt the English people owe to their powers of absorbing imports. The very watchwords of progress and catchwords of liberty, from the trial by jury which was ascribed to Alfred the Great to the charter extorted from John, were alien immigrants. We call them alien because they were alien to the Anglo-Saxons; but they are the warp and woof of English institutions, which are too great and too complex to have sprung from purely insular sources.