longer needed, and England and Scotland came under The peace of the waters began with the and Eadgar :—

the same king.

navies of Alfred

The coast became unsafe whenever its defence was neglected, as it was before the defeat of Hastings. There was no sweet reasonableness that guarded the sea, but the obedience to the common cry of the sea that was answered by armed men, as it came surging up through the land. The vikings came still, till raiding began not to pay; the French came always; the men of the Peninsula infested the Channel till Edward won the victory of the Spaniards on the sea. Briefs were read in the Devonshire churches as late as the days of Charles II, to release captives carried off by Algerian pirates. England has been free from invasion for centuries, because the justiciars of the sea kept the peace. Charles I lucidly. explained the connection between a navy and justice, when he wrote: "The king will suffer no other fleets or men-of-war to keep any guard upon these seas, or there to offer violence, or take prizes or booties, or to give interruption to any lawful intercourse. In a word, His Majesty is resolved, as to do no wrong, so to do justice, both to his subjects and friends, within the limits of his seas."

There need only to be a declaration of war, for it to be instantly understood with no need for explanation that war is inseparably connected with justice; the nation would know in a moment that an admiral like Lord Charles Beresford was a justiciar. They would not even need to be told that it is only under the protection of a captain

like Blake, that their persons would be safe, declaring that none but an Englishman should chastise an Englishman; or their property under a seaman such as Nelson, who on the evacuation of Corsica pulled out his watch and gave the committee one quarter of an hour to consider whether they would wish him to open fire or not. But on peace within the realm ideas are more misty; memories are short, and this generation has forgotten what was as familiar to their fathers as almost a daily routine, when village constables were still elected, and the militia went out to guard the coast. If the history of law were still taught among the other branches of social history, men would need no telling that keeping the peace was both a passive and an active duty. All citizens are bound not to break it, but they are also bound to see that others do not break it. The real as well as the theoretical perception of these two obligations quicken the national consciousness, and make a nation ready to forestall disorder by giving no cause that it should be broken. The duty of making the law, administering the law, and seeing that the law is obeyed, are not divisible. When they are divided injustice or discontent follows, and not until the endeavour to restore the peace becomes a pressing problem is there recognition of the fact that a wise policy gives no cause for offence that can only be remedied by war. It is forgotten that there never has been a time when it has not been known that there were worse things than war. Polybius, Tacitus, Le Roman de Rou, connect justice with war: "I admit, indeed, that war is a terrible thing; but it is less terrible than to submit to anything whatever in order to avoid it. Captivity for their women is a thing their men abhor. No man can be respected by others who fails to secure justice for his own." Nations despairing have known this truth; they have opened their gates to Saracens, Moors and Turks; citizens even fled from the

Roman Empire to live among the Goths; the coming of the barbarians freed the slaves.

The truth is written large in history; but the broad outlines have the details filled in when we come to the history of England and English law. Since without life nothing is of value, the blood feud comes first in the history of warlike peoples, though it may be safely conjectured that, while many a child knows of the cities of refuge in the time of Joshua, it would be difficult to find one who was acquainted with the regulation for the avenging of blood in his own country. Yet the appeal to battle was actually made at the beginning of the nineteenth century in a trial for murder before the Lord Chief Justice (Rex v. Thornton).1

The Justices of Assize do not appear suddenly, dei ex machina, to conduct trials for capital offences, sent into the counties with the king's commission to do justice between him and the prisoner at the bar. The very formula of the juror's oath recalls that it is the people who pass between the prisoner and the sovereign justice-that the central power merely regularises and enforces the justice of the folk. According to Chief Justice Vaughan in the reign of Charles II, it is not even the judge who implicitly declares the law, for the jurors are the ancient law-makers, "they resolve the law complicately with the fact." They declare the law, as a petty jury, because long before there were judges they declared in the folk-moot the custom of the race; with clash of spear and shield they adjudged all murderers to be outlaws and banished men. The resolutions of the Witan were submitted to them in their county. courts, and "weds "taken from them to observe the law. The theory of the law is that the jurors know the law, since all Englishmen know it, having declared it or hearing it promulgated, assenting to it. They not only declare the law,

1 Abraham Thomson had to be discharged as the challenge was refused. The ordeal by battle was abolished in 1819 (59 Geo. III, c. 6).

they demand the law; the Danes and Saxons were unanimous for Eadgar's law. William the Conqueror summoned the juries of all the shires of England to declare what Eadward's law was; as full and sufficient a parliament, Lord Hale declared, as was ever held in England. The law makers enforce the law, for Henry III summoned all the juries to besiege an obstinate noble who had imprisoned the king's judges in Bedford Castle; they took the castle, hanged its defenders, and thrust Fulk, the rebel, into exile. The committal for contempt of Court exists long before any king appointed judges; the customs of the City of London declare the duty that lay on every citizen to pursue the criminal from one shire to another by the king's "oferhyrnes" —that is, contempt in the present legal sense of the term, and also the penalty affixed to such contempt. The pursuit was for the common "frith" of us all, and the memory that justice has its origin in war is preserved in the indictment of prisoners for offences against the peace of the king, as it used to be against the peace of the hundred, of the lord, of the bailiffs, or the sheriffs, according to the Court in which the case was tried. The matter was so well understood that metaphor declared the devil was out of God's peace.

With this reading of the term peace many things in history take on a different aspect. Slavery is a merciful commutation of the death penalty; ransom is a compensation for the slain, and a war indemnity; the man who makes public or private war, more especially in the form of a sudden raid, is "out of the peace." In a battle with Ethelred, king of the Mercians, an Earl declares that a prisoner deserves to die because "all my brothers and relations were killed in that fight." Olaf Haraldson is ready to negotiate peace with the Swedish king in 1017, excepting for the death of his men, for the Swedish king cannot with money pay for the men the Swedes have deprived us of. When the feeling of England was very

bitter against Scotland, "the Englysshmen wolde not saue them though it so were that dyvers Scottes offered gret sumes of money for theyr lyves." In our own day where primitive justice prevails there is still the custom of reckoning the slain on one side against those slain on the other, and paying the manslaughter mulct for the remainder. From this the first step is the regulation of private war; the fixing of the wergild for the life of each man according to his degree, and the angylde of stolen property. Before the fight takes place the ealdorman or the king is to be appealed to; the reeves of each district are to come with their forces to pursue the criminal, as the sheriff before the days of railways accompanied the king's judges from county border to county border. If, for the first time, the sculptor had to fashion a statue of Justice, it may be questioned whether he would not make it, like Tennyson's Freedom, not with a sword of wrath, but the scroll of the latest Act of Parliament, or a volume of the Digest. Those who first brought justice among men copied reality, as they saw it in their lives, and made weapons of war symbolise Justice. The people of England demanded the law of Eadward. Mr. Inderwick, in his King's Peace, says that, by the arms of the reigning sovereign were placed in the King's Bench the arms of Eadward. The chronicler of the Coronation of Henry III says, that the sword "Curtein" was carried, the sword of the Confessor, as a symbol that the justice of England could be turned against the king himself. The mace was the sign of the authority of local jurisdiction. Cities were communities that had right to use Regaleius, that is, sovereign rights within the city limits. The sword was the more effective weapon, and was the sign of a higher authority. With it the earl received his earldom; with it the knight was made the representative of his fellow knights in the county court. John received the sword of the Duchy of Normandy in the Cathedral of