In the reign of Henry I we also noticed evidence which proved the occasional, and led us to suspect the somewhat regular employment of itinerant justices. This institution was put into definite and permanent form by his grandson. The kingdom was at first divided into six circuits, to each of which three justices were sent. Afterwards the number of justices was reduced. These justices, though not all members of the small court at Westminster, were all, it is likely, familiar with its work, and to each circuit at least one justice of the Westminster court was probably always assigned. What they carried into each county of the kingdom as they went the round of their districts was not a new court and not a local court; it was the curia regis itself, and that too in its administrative as well as in its judicial functions indeed it is easy to suspect that it was quite as much the administrative side of its work,--the desire to check the abuses of the sheriffs by investigation on the spot, and to improve the collection of money due to the crown, as its judicial,--as the wish to render the operation of the law more convenient by trying cases in the communities where they arose, that led to the development of this side of the judicial system. Whatever led to it, this is what had begun, a new branch of the judicial organization. It was in these courts, these king's courts,--the trial court at Westminster and the court of the itinerant justices in the different counties,--that the institution began to be put into regular use that has become so characteristic a distinction of the Anglo-Saxon judicial system--the jury. The history of the jury cannot here be told. It is sufficient to say that it existed in the Frankish empire of the early ninth century in a form apparently as highly developed as in the Norman kingdom of the early twelfth. From Charles the Great to Henry II it remained in what was practically a stationary condition. It was only on English soil, and after the impulse given to it by the broader uses in which it was now employed that it began the marvellous development from which our liberty has gained so much. At the beginning it was a process belonging to the sovereign and used solely for his business, or employed for the business of others only by his permission in the special case. What Henry seems to have done was to generalize this use, to establish certain classes of cases in which it might always be employed by his subjects, but in his courts only. In essence it was a process for getting local knowledge to bear on a doubtful question of fact of interest to the government. Ought A to pay a certain tax? The question is usually to be settled by answering another: Have his ancestors before him paid it, or the land which he now holds? The memory of the neighbours can probably determine this, and a certain number of the men likely to know are summoned before the officer representing the king, put on oath, and