The task of preserving order in the medieval state was in the main the task of repressing and punishing crimes of violence. Murder and assault, robbery and burglary, fill the earliest court records, and on the civil side a large proportion of the cases, like those under the assizes of Mort d'Ancestor and Novel Disseisin, concerned attacks on property not very different in character. The problem of the ruler in this department of government was so to perfect the judicial machinery and procedure as to protect peaceable citizens from bodily harm and property from violent entry and from fraud closely akin to violence. An additional and immediate incentive to the improvement of the judicial system arose from the income which was derived from fines and confiscations, both heavier and more common punishments for crime than in the modern state. It would be unfair to a king like Henry II, however, to convey the impression that an increase of income was the only, or indeed the main, thing sought in the reform of the courts. Order and security for land and people were always in his mind to be sought for themselves, as a chief part of the duty of a king, and certainly this was the case with his ministers who must have had more to do than he with the determining and perfecting of details. This is not the place to describe the judicial reforms of the reign in technical minuteness or from the point of view of the student of constitutional history. The activity of a great king, the effect on people and government are the subjects of interest here. The series of formal documents in which Henry's reforming efforts are embodied opens with the Constitutions of Clarendon in 1164. Of the king's purpose in this--not new legislation, but an effort to bring the clergy under responsibility to the state for their criminal acts according to the ancient practice,--and of its results, we have already had the story. The second in the series, the Assize of Clarendon, the first that concerns the civil judicial system, though we have good reason to suspect that it was not actually Henry's first attempt at reform, dates from early in the year 1166. It dealt with the detection and punishment of crime, and greatly improved the means at the command of the state for these purposes. In 1170, to check the independence of the sheriffs and their abuse of power for private ends, of which there were loud complaints, he ordered strict inquiry to be made, by barons appointed for the purpose, into the conduct of the sheriffs and the abuses complained of, and removed a large number of them, appointing others less subject to the temptations which the local magnate was not likely to resist. This was a blow at the hold of the feudal baronage on the office, and a step in its transformation into a subordinate executive office, which was rapidly going on during the reign. In 1176, in the Assize of Northampton, the provisions of the Assize of Clarendon for the enforcement of criminal