any jurisdiction, whether by franchise or otherwise, necessarily were concerned with the maintenance of their proper jurisprudence both for political and economic reasons. Wherever this jurisprudence was largely customary both the courtkeeper and those who lived by the custom possessed a common interest. This interest did not lose its indefeasible quality by the injection from intellectual quarters of the belief in the existence of a right rule, an idea which underlay the system of ecclesiastical appeals and was equally the rationale of the English writ of error proceeding. For a right rule was not something existent in the abstract, but in terms of a particular body of law. It did not follow that one qualified in the law of England was jurisconsultus peritus in the law of any other land under the King's lordship. The question of judicial competence generally was a political and juristic problem common to western Europe and of long standing. As a matter of internal legal development it was inherent in the relations of competitive jurisdictions with conflicting regional customs; and in places where centralizing tendencies were at work it presented obstacles to the process of integrating local and national courts, local and national customs. A solution of these various problems was further complicated by popular reaction against the spread of professional judging at the expense of the ancient community exercise of this function. 117 Although there were strong feelings of loyalty about the preservation of traditional bodies of law, these feelings had small chance of expression at the appellate level, since the theory upon which temporal appellate authority originally depended virtually excluded any practical implementation of objections to competence at the court of final instance. Whether, as in England, the ultimate authority of the suzerain rested in a particular prerogative or, as in France, upon the principle that all court-keeping rights were held of the King, 118 the suzerain was in seisin of pleas by way of appeal, and even if there had been a legal weapon to attack such seisin, there was no higher forum of recourse. Furthermore, as the false judgment proceedings were originally which comes to separate French and English estimate of the individual is indicated by the expression couchant et levant which the French lawyers use to designate the person subject to a jurisdiction, an expression which in English law was used in connection with cattle. 117 The classical example of reaction is the indicium parium clause of Magna Carta, the intendment of which is a restoration of community judging. There is some scattered twelfth-century evidence of dissatisfaction besides the famous pun of John of Salisbury about the "errant justices"; cf. the complaints of Peter of Blois in a letter to Henry II (207 Migne, Patrologia, 293), and Marie de France's fable, Dou leu et de Vaingniel (Bartsch, Chrestomathie [sth ed.], 270). Evidence from France may be found in Meynial, Remarques sur la reaction populaires contre I'invasion du droit romain en France aux XII et XIII siecles, in Melanges Chabanneau (1907), 557. 118 "Toute la laie iuridicion du roiaume est tenue du roy en fief ou en arriere-fief" (Beamanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis [Salmon ed.], no. 322). For early assertions cf. Mitteis, Lehnrecht und Staatsgewalt, 290 n. 92.