The vices of both systems were the same. The local
officials were too powerful within their respective spheres; neither inspectors
nor royal courts proved adequate as safeguards against corruption and abuses of
authority, which were the more frequent because the vicious expedients of
farming and selling offices had become an established practice. Otherwise the
English system was superior to that of France, particularly in making use for
certain purposes of local representatives as an additional check upon the
servants of the Crown. The English shire was in fact as well as in law a
community with a true corporate character (communitas), and possessed a
public assembly which was a law court and a local parliament in one. Though the
ordinary suitor counted for little, the secondary landowners, united by ties of
local sentiment and personal relationship, took a lively interest and an active
share in the business of the shire court, upholding the local custom against
sheriffs and judges, serving as jurors, as assessors of taxes, as guardians of
the peace, and (from the fourteenth century) as petty magistrates.
Whether
elected by their fellows or the nominees of the Crown, these functionaries were
unpaid, and regarded themselves as the defenders of local liberty against
official usurpations. In France the district of the bailli, and still
more that of his subordinate the prevot, was an arbitrary creation,
without natural unity or corporate sentiment; there was therefore no organised
resistance to executive authority, and no reason why the Crown should court the
goodwill of the landed gentry. In the lower grades of the Plantagenet system a
powerful middle class served a political apprenticeship; under the Capets all power
and responsibility were jealously reserved to the professional administrator.
In England the next step in constitutional development, the addition to the
national assembly of a Third Estate, was brilliantly successful, since the
House of Commons was chiefly recruited from families which had long been active
partners in local administration. In France the Third Estate, though constantly
summoned in the fourteenth century, proved itself politically impotent.
