which they had started. They did nothing to explore the content of the King's lordship in his dominions, and consequently there was here nothing to match the accretions of constitutional doctrine with respect to his capacities within the realm. The resort to the principle of personal ligeance to settle the status in English law of the King's non-English subjects shows clearly how he remained in the judicial imagination a pristine feudal suzerain as to his outlying possessions. It is in this guise that he is clothed when America is discovered, and from the moment that the first colonizing charters are sealed, the struggle commences to maintain as to the New World establishments the capacities and powers conceded by the common law to inhere in the King as to his possessions outside the kingdom. If issues relating to the dominions had arisen more frequently and less collaterally, it is conceivable the English courts would have extricated themselves from the strange corner into which they had been driven by the imperative of their property-mindedness. But the limitations upon their jurisdiction were such that they never had to grapple with the problem as something fundamental and of the first order. The early acceptance of the rule respecting the restricted ambit of writs initiating litigation excluded original jurisdiction over causes extra regnum. The opportunities for direct exposition of the law were therefore confined to the causes that might come by way of transfer or by way of review. What we describe as transfer is the familiar removal of cases coram rege because of franchise to be so heard, because of particular royal interest, or as a result of special petition. This is initially an aspect of conciliar jurisdiction which, along with other judicial business, came to be centered in King's Bench in the period when it was still a limb of Curia Regis and which remained there after the assumption of a distinct identity as a court for the realm. The removal of inland causes played an important part in the expansion of King's Bench's supervisory powers and was rapidly integrated into the common law system, because it was exercised in accordance with the postulates of common law practice. Such conditions did not obtain in the dominions (except in Ireland) and consequently transfer jurisdiction here retains its original quality of special reference. Circumstances therefore favored neither judicial expressions of policy respecting the law overseas nor the building of any body of precedent. Furthermore, after 1289 transfers from Ireland were discouraged, 61 and in the course of the fourteenth century the Channel Islanders resisted the practice, until it was at last relinquished. 52 Perhaps the most significant contribution of this jurisdiction was the formulation and promotion of a policy that 51 2 Sayles, Select Cases in the Court of King's 52 LePatourel, op. cit., 112-13. Bench (Seldcn Soc. 1938), lx.