In the history of judicial administration the personal initiative of Henry II is more evident than in finance. The king had an especial fondness for legal questions and often participated in their decision, yet his influence was exerted particularly to develop a system of courts and judges which could work in his absence and without his intervention. Although the institution is found previously both in England and Normandy, it is in Henry’s reign that the system of itinerant justices is fully organized with regular circuits and a rapidly extending jurisdiction which broke down local privileges and exemptions and by its decisions created the common law. Hitherto chiefly a feudal assembly concerned with the causes of the king and his barons, after Henry’s time the king’s court is a permanent body of professional judges and a tribunal for the whole realm. It is no accident that his reign produced in the treatise of Glanvill on _The Laws and Customs of England_ the first of the great series of textbooks which are the landmarks of English legal development. Henry’s reign is also an important period in the growth of Norman law, the earliest formulation of which reaches us ten years after his death in the _Très Ancien Coutumier de Normandie_, and the reduction of local custom to writing is a process which went on in his other continental possessions; yet, as in finance, England and Normandy plainly took the lead in legal literature and in legal development. Indeed, the distinction between justice and finance is less sharp than we might at first suppose, for the growth of jurisdiction meant increased profit from fees and fines, and heavy payments were necessary to secure the intervention of the royal judges. In this sense Henry has often been called, and rightly, a seller of justice, but his latest biographer has pointed out that “if the commodity was expensive it was at least the best of its kind, and there is a profound gulf between the selling of justice and of injustice. A bribe might be required to set the machine of the law in motion, but it would be unavailing to divert its course when once started.”[37] The wheels of government are turned by self-interest as well as by unselfish statesmanship.