It was a considerable achievement of the English King's courts to convert 
the old false judgment, essentially a vindictive proceeding, into something resembling 
an administrative inquiry into complaints against local courts, directed 
toward the determination of whether or not any material ingredient of 
due process in the original suit was missing. The record and the pleading upon 
it were merely a means of getting such issues before the supervisory tribunal 
in a way which would have been closed had the proffered record been invulnerable. 
Even by the middle of the thirteenth century this review by the 
King's court had not reached the state of a continuation of the litigation inter 
partes at a higher instance in a judicial hierarchy, but by indulging the use of 
the technique of common law controversy to displace the older formal procedure, 
an advance toward a true error jurisdiction was effected. . 
How far the recordari facias procedure, developed in the atmosphere of the 
new remedial law of the English courts, could be adapted to false judgments 
from the various dominions where the King had lordship must have been 
questionable. By any test the traditional false judgment procedure was illadapted 
to the ends of a centralized imperial administration. It had developed 
and was workable within confined geographic limits. A journey from Bayonne 
to Westminster to engage in personal combat with the representative of a 
local court over a lost action was hardly an attractive prospect. There was, 
furthermore, enormous inconvenience connected with the transport of the 
human record bearers, whose physical presence even the reformed English 
practice required. The obvious solution was to preserve the jurisdictional prerogative 
over false judgments, but to remake the procedure itself. A first and 
obvious step was to follow in the path of the canon law (of which more in a 
moment) and permit a written record to substitute for an oral statement. In 
the then state of secular procedure this was a prospect of mountainous difficulty, 
for it involved a break with traditional ways which ran back into Anglo- 
Saxon and Frankish times, and so were as indurated as compurgation or trial 
by battle. The most serious legal obstacle, since the sanction was penal, was the 
restriction that would be put upon the defense if the testimony of the accused 
court was confined to a written instrument. By the same token the supervisory 
function would be limited to the faults disclosed by such writing and to this 
extent fall short of the results achievable by a personal examination of record 
bearers. 
The thirteenth century was better than half over before the written remembrance 
finally established itself as the record in the King's courts. These had 
ever shown a strong predilection for human testimony, even if merely formal. 
This pervaded their handling of documents generally, and consequently, although 
they early reduced their own proceedings to writing, they delayed