That monarch appears
to have sent commissioners to hold shire-gemotes or county
meetings, where they proclaimed the laws made by the king and
his counsellors, which, being acknowledged and sworn to at these
folk-motes (meetings of the people) became, by their assent,
completely binding on the whole nation." Mackintosh's Hist. of
England, Ch. 2. 45 Lardner's Cab. Cc., 75.
[5] Page 31.
[6] Hallam says, "It was, however, to the county court that an
English freeman chiefly looked for the maintenance of his civil
rights." 2 Middle Ages, 392.
Also, "This (the county court) was the great constitutional
judicature in all ques- tions of civil right." Ditto, 395.
Also, "The liberties of these Anglo-Saxon thanes were chiefly
secured, next to their swords and their free spirits, by the
inestimable right of deciding civil and criminal suits in their
own county courts." Ditto, 899.
[7] "Alfred may, in one sense, be called the founder of these
laws, (the Saxon,) for until his time they were an unwrittencode,
but he expressly says, 'that I, Alfred, collected the good laws of
our forefathers into one code, and also I wrote them down'
-- which is a decisive fact in the history of our laws well
worth noting.
Pages:
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225