As law began now to be well established, the abuse of that blessing began also to be remarked.

Instead of their former associations for robbery and violence, men entered into formal combinations to support each other in lawsuits, and it was found requisite to check this iniquity by act of parliament.[***] There happened in this reign a considerable alteration in the execution of the laws: the king abolished the office of chief justiciary, which, he thought, possessed too much power, and was dangerous to the crown;[****] he completed the division of the court of exchequer into four distinct courts, which managed each its several branch, without dependence on any one magistrate; and as the lawyers afterwards invented a method, by means of their fictions, of carrying business from one court to another, the several courts became rivals and checks to each other; a circumstance which tended much to improve the practice of the law in England.
* Statute of Winton.
** Statute of Acton Burnel *** Statute of Conspirators.
**** Spel.

Gloss, in verbo Justiciarius.
Gilbert's History of the Exchequer, p.

8: not bound to it by his tenure; his visible reluctance to confirm the Great Charter, as if that concession had no validity from the deeds of his predecessors; the captious clause which he at last annexed to his confirmation; his procuring of the pope's dispensation from the oaths which he had taken to observe that charter; and his levying of talliages at discretion even after the statute, or rather charter, by which he had renounced that prerogative; these are so many demonstrations of his arbitrary disposition, and prove with what exception and reserve we ought to celebrate his love of justice.

He took care that his subjects should do justice to each other; but he desired always to have his own hands free in all his transactions, both with them and with his neighbors.
But though Edward appeared thus, throughout his whole reign, a friend to law and justice, it cannot be said that he was an enemy to arbitrary power; and in a government more regular and legal than was that of England in his age, such practices as those which may be remarked in his administration, would have given sufficient ground of complaint, and sometimes were even in his age the object of general displeasure.