make at their pleasure. Much of this work came to be done by
their legislative assemblies; more by their courts. The
assemblies sat but for a few days in the year: the courts were
always open to suitors, and sessions of the inferior ones were
frequent.

The assemblies, however, were themselves courts. At first they
kept in their own hands a large share of judicial power. They
acted as the early parliaments of England had acted, both as a
legislature and a judicial tribunal. In several colonies they
long kept to themselves the right of deciding private
controversies on equitable principles. They sat as a court of
review, to grant new trials or review judgments. They passed
acts of attainder. They settled insolvent estates.[Footnote:
Wheeler's Appeal, 45 Connecticut Reports, 306, 314.]

This mingling of judicial with legislative functions is a thing
to be tolerated only while the foundations of a government are
being laid. As the Roman plebeian, in the days before the Twelve
Tables, clamored for a known and certain law, so the common
people of the early colonies insisted that from a similar want
they held their rights too much at the will of their rulers. In
the colony of New Haven a code was early framed; but there they
built on a written law--the Bible.[Footnote: New Haven Colony
Records, I, 12, 115, 116; II, 569, 570.] In Massachusetts, where
they were more anxious to avoid conflict with the common law, the
problem was a serious one.

Winthrop, writing in 1639, describes it with his usual clearness
and discrimination thus: