The preservation of order throughout the country was originally intrusted not only to the sheriff, coroner, and constables, but to certain magistrates called conservators of the peace. These, in conformity to the democratic character of our Saxon government, were elected by the freeholders in their county court.[394] But Edward I. issued commissions to carry into effect the statute of Winton; and from the beginning of Edward III.'s reign the appointment of conservators was vested in the crown, their authority gradually enlarged by a series of statutes, and their titles changed to that of justices. They were empowered to imprison and punish all rioters and other offenders, and such as they should find by indictment or suspicion to be reputed thieves or vagabonds, and to take sureties for good behaviour from persons of evil fame.[395] Such a jurisdiction was hardly more arbitrary than, in a free and civilized age, it has been thought fit to vest in magistrates; but it was ill endured by a people who placed their notions of liberty in personal exemption from restraint rather than any political theory. An act having been passed (2 R. II. stat. 2, c. 6), in consequence of unusual riots and outrages, enabling magistrates to commit the ringleaders of tumultuary assemblies without waiting for legal process till the next arrival of justices of gaol delivery, the commons petitioned next year against this "horrible grievous ordinance," by which "every freeman in the kingdom would be in bondage to these justices," contrary to the great charter, and to many statutes, which forbid any man to be taken without due course of law.[396] So sensitive was their jealousy of arbitrary imprisonment, that they preferred enduring riot and robbery to chastising them by any means that might afford a precedent to oppression, or weaken men's reverence for Magna Charta. There are two subjects remaining to which this retrospect of the state of manners naturally leads us, and which I would not pass unnoticed, though not perhaps absolutely essential to a constitutional history; because they tend in a very material degree to illustrate the progress of society, with which civil liberty and regular government are closely connected. These are, first, the servitude or villenage of the peasantry, and their gradual emancipation from that condition; and, secondly, the continual increase of commercial intercourse with foreign countries. But as the latter topic will fall more conveniently into the next part of this work, I shall postpone its consideration for the present. [Sidenote: Villenage of the peasantry. Its nature and gradual extinction.]