overruled by the feudal element among the judges; because the rules of
procedure were uncertain and the decisions based not upon a scientific
jurisprudence but on provincial custom. The Diet of the Empire was weak,
both in deliberation and as a legislature; because the towns and the
lesser nobility had no respect for resolutions in framing which they had
not been consulted. The executive was necessarily inefficient or
unpopular; because the highest offices were claimed as a right by
princes who, if laymen, owed their rank to the accident of birth or, if
ecclesiastics, could only be good servants of the State by becoming
unworthy servants of the Church. The Emperor who confided in his natural
counsellors was ill-served; and if he relied upon new men, selected
solely for their loyalty and qualifications, he incurred the reproach of
tyranny or submission to unworthy favourites. The evils thus rooted in
the German constitution had existed at an earlier date in France and
England. To eradicate them was the object of the constitutional changes
devised by the Plantagenets in England, by the later Capetian kings in
France. And in essentials there is a strong likeness between the work of
the two dynasties. But in England the policy of construction was earlier
adopted, proceeded more rapidly, and produced an edifice which was more
durable because established on a broader basis.

The first stage of the policy was to organise the administration of
those parts of each kingdom which, not having been absorbed in
privileged fiefs, were still subject to the royal justice and
contributory to the royal revenue. Owing to the foresight of William the
Conqueror, there were few such fiefs in England; only in two palatine
earldoms (Durham and Cheshire), on the Welsh and northern borders, and
on the lands of a few prelates, was the king permanently cut off from
immediate contact with the subject population. With these exceptions the
face of England was divided into shires, and administered by sheriffs