For in fact the king was the authority to be resorted to in the last instance; not because he could introduce a system of jurisprudence founded upon Roman Decretals or Alaric’s Breviary,—which his favourite advisers would probably have liked much better than his ealdormen, præfects and people,—but because he could lend the aid of the state to enforce the judgments of the several courts, or even compel the courts to give judgment, by reason of the central power which he wielded as king. As long however as the courts themselves were willing to decide causes brought before them, which the people assembled in the gemóts did, under the presidency and direction of the customary officers, the king had no right to interfere: and even to appeal to the king until justice had been actually denied in the proper quarter was an offence under the Saxon law, punishable by fine[63]. In short, under that law, the people were themselves the judges, and helped the geréfa to find the judgment, be the court what it might be. The king’s authority could give no more than power to execute the sentence. It is remarkable enough that while Asser speaks of the instruction and correction which Ælfred administered to his judges, he does not even insinuate that their decisions were reversed,—a fact perfectly intelligible when we bear in mind that these decisions were not those of judges in our sense of the word, and as the Mirror plainly understood them, but of the people in their own courts, finding the judgment according to customary law. It would have been a very different case had the courts been the king’s courts; and in those where the class called king’s thanes stood to right either before the king himself, or the king’s geréfa, it is possible that Ælfred may have interfered. This he had full right to do, inasmuch as these thanes were exclusively his own sócmen, and must take such law as he chose to give them[64]. Indeed the words of Asser seem reconcileable with the general state of the law in Ælfred’s time only on the supposition that he refers to these royal courts or þeningmanna gemót; for the king could never have been expected to be present at every shire- or hundred-mót, and yet Asser says he diligently investigated such judgments as were given when he was not present, almost all over his region. This only becomes probable when confined to the administration of justice in the several counties in his own royal courts, and by his own royal reeves, in whose method of proceeding he was at liberty to introduce much more extensive alterations at pleasure, than he could have done in the customary law of the shires or other districts. ----- Footnote 63: