special privileges which Henry II and his sons had threatened or taken away. Some of these liberties were dangerous obstacles to the common welfare--for instance the "liberty" of every lord of the manor to try all suits relating to property and possession in his own manorial court, or to be punished by his fellow-barons instead of by the judges of the king's court. This was what the barons meant by their famous demand in Magna Carta that every man should be judged by his peers; they insisted that the royal judges were not their peers, but only servants of the crown, and their demands in these respects were reactionary proposals which might have been fatal to liberty as we conceive it. Nor is there anything about trial by jury or "no taxation without representation" in Magna Carta. What we mean by "trial by jury" was not developed till long after 1215; there was still no national, but only class taxation; and the great council, which was to give its assent to royal demands for money, represented nobody but the tenants-in-chief of whom it was composed. All that the barons meant by this clause was that they, as feudal tenants-in-chief, were not to pay more than the ordinary feudal dues. But they left to the king, and they reserved to themselves, the right to tallage their villeins as arbitrarily as they pleased; and even where they seem to be protecting the villeins, they are only preventing the king from levying such judicial fines from their villeins as would make it impossible for those villeins to render their services to the lords. It was to be no affair of the king or nation if a lord exacted the uttermost farthing from his own chattels; legally, the villeins, who were the bulk of the nation, remained after Magna Carta, as before, in the position of a man's ox or horse to-day, except that there was no law for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Finally, the provision that no one was to be arrested until he had been convicted would, if carried out, have made impossible the administration of justice.