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latitude. An arbitrary power lodges in such commissions.
The officers termed vergers, the coroners making part of the sheriff's
cortège, and the clerks of the market as escort, with gentlemen on
horseback and their servants in livery, made a handsome suite. The
sheriff, says Chamberlayne, is the "life of justice, of law, and of the
country."
In England an insensible demolition constantly pulverizes and dissevers
laws and customs. You must understand in our day that neither the
sheriff, the wapentake, nor the justice of the quorum could exercise
their functions as they did then. There was in the England of the past a
certain confusion of powers, whose ill-defined attributes resulted in
their overstepping their real bounds at times--a thing which would be
impossible in the present day. The usurpation of power by police and
justices has ceased. We believe that even the word "wapentake" has
changed its meaning. It implied a magisterial function; now it signifies
a territorial division: it specified the centurion; it now specifies the
hundred (centum).
Moreover, in those days the sheriff of the county combined with
something more and something less, and condensed in his own authority,
which was at once royal and municipal, the two magistrates formerly
called in France the civil lieutenant of Paris and the lieutenant of
police. The civil lieutenant of Paris, Monsieur, is pretty well
described in an old police note: "The civil lieutenant has no dislike to
domestic quarrels, because he always has the pickings" (22nd July 1704).
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