We may then fairly inquire what was the relation which these new manorial courts bore to the old national courts which they were destined to supplant. With reference to the hundred and shire assemblies, the answer is fairly simple: the two systems of jurisdiction were concurrent. The hundred court, we must remember, was in no sense inferior to the shire court, and in the same way the manorial court was in no sense inferior to either of these bodies; it rested with the individual litigant before which of them he should bring his plea, with this most important exception—that the lord of the party impleaded could if he wished “claim his court,” and so appropriate the profits of the trial. Here was a most powerful force steadily drawing business away from the shires and hundreds, and attracting it within the purview of the manor. But then the wishes of the peasantry told in the same direction: the manorial court was close at hand; it was composed of neighbours who knew each others’ concerns, and were constantly associated in the common agricultural work of the vill; it gratified the tendencies towards local isolation, which were pre-eminently strong in the early Middle Ages. The manorial court supplied justice at home, and we should remember how many hindrances beset recourse to the hundreds and shires. In all Staffordshire there were only five hundreds; in all Leicestershire only four wapentakes; the prosecution of a suit in any of these courts must have meant grievous weariness and loss, the establishment of a manorial court must have meant an immediate alleviation of the law’s delay. He would have been an exceptionally far-sighted villein who in 1086 could foresee that the convenient local court would eventually be the agent by which his descendants would be thrown into dependence on the will of the lord, with no other protection than the traditional and unwritten “custom of the manor”; that the establishment of the lord’s justice would ultimately exclude all reference to the more independent if more antiquated justice of the men of the hundred of the shire, on the part of the lesser folk of his vill.
One question connected with the rise of manorial courts deserves attention here—did they displace any court proper to the vill as a whole, independently of its manorial aspect? It is clear that every now and again the men of the vill must have met, if only to regulate the details of its open-field husbandry. But whether such a meeting had any formal constitution or judicial functions—whether, that is, it was a “township-moot,” in the accepted sense of the words[318]—is excessively doubtful. The fact that we hear nothing definitely about it in the documents of the Anglo-Saxon period is not quite conclusive against its existence; it is more to the point that the hundred moot seems to be the lowest stage reached by the descending series of national courts. It is probable, therefore, that the ordinary township never possessed any court other than that which belonged to it in its manorial aspect.