with its own customs and procedures; the chancery, a permanent
secretariat, later followed it. So too, during the late twelfth and
early thirteenth centuries, other offshoots of the curia regis devel-
oped to hear the greatly increased number of pleas. These com-
mon law courts included the justices of the bench at Westmin-
ster, the itinerant justices sent on eyre throughout the kingdom,
and the court coram rege, held wherever the king might be.

The fact that each of these three courts was known as a curia
regis, although only one of them actually followed the king,
raises an important question: To what extent were the royal
courts subject to the king's will? It is possible that the royal
courts had become, like the exchequer, a branch of the curia
regis with a settled routine that did not require the monarch's
constant supervision, but it is also possible that the king was
active in the day-to-day administration of justice. Today two
authorities in English legal and constitutional history, G. O.
Sayles and H. G. Richardson, maintain that Angevin govern-
ment was an "impersonal monarchy" in which the judiciar exer-
cised a greater responsibility in judicial administration than did
the king. One of the major themes of their version of English
history is the wide powers wielded by the justiciar, ² but their
theory must be tested by a study of the ruler's role in justice. The
problem is perhaps most clearly stated by A. J. Carlyle:

The history of mediaeval society constantly impresses upon us the
conviction that the real difference between a barbarous and a civi-
lised political system lies in the fact that the latter has an almost
automatically working administrative and judicial machinery, while
the former is dependent upon the chance of the presence of some ex-
ceptionally competent and clear-sighted individual ruler. ³

In this work, I hope to determine to what extent England had
developed "an almost automatically working . . . judicial ma-
chinery" and to what extent it still depended upon "the chance
of the presence of some exceptionally competent and clear-

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