This function had been discharged locally by commissioners, a practice resembling that used from time to time in Gascony. The royal response to this petition was to grant an additional clause to the charter that no errors were to be corrected out of Calais unless the King were a party, and pleas of land and tenements were involved. 158 Taken together, these three episodes may be regarded as a partial surrender to the pervasive conviction that a man was entitled to a judgment by those competent in the law of the place. In no case, however, was the ultimate right of appeal to the King cut off, but such recourse was now conceived to be exceptional. With this volte face, the opportunity of building some offset against the underlying weakness of the medieval empire—the heterogeneity of the private law —was virtually lost. The feudal theory which centered in the suzerain the ultimate power of supervision and correction was itself no absolute impediment to a development of some uniformity which ought to have been furthered by the employment of substantially identical forms of process. The English Kings, however, came close to achieving legal community only in the case of Ireland, for elsewhere political expediency and especially the pressure of localism in its various guises made each dominion a problem for particular treatment. It was typical of the times that nearly everything was laid upon the recognition or maintenance of the royal claims to jurisdiction. This objective was served as well by a delegation via royal commission or by referring a cause back, as by actual hearing coram rege. The centrifugal tendency of these ideas as much as anything else prevented the appeal jurisdiction from developing into something more than a political instrumentality. One may doubt if any other result would have attended the centering of appellate authority in King's Bench, a policy briefly extended under Edward I with respect to Scottish causes. 1 " 9 For even under the most favorable circumstances, the appellate device is the poorest of all ways of building either a sense of legal community or a coherent body of law. Too much depends upon the ire and resolve of litigants, the length of their purses, and in the Middle Ages upon their capacity to pursue the King übicunque juerit. One may further question how successfully the men who lived by the Register of Writs would have dealt with problems from the pays de droit ecrit or some knotty fragment of the laws of Hywel Dda. The medieval King's Council, for all the vagarity of its personnel, was tinctured with a cosmopolitanism that put it closer in touch with far-off places. If it failed in its judicial capacity to propagate legal community in the empire, at least it set the precedents of jurisdiction for its lineal 158 Upon a second petition {ibid., 87). and Sayles, The Scottish Parliaments of Edward 159 2 Sayles, Select Cases in the Court of King's I, in 25 Scottish Historical Review, 300 et seq. Bench (Selden Soc), lxii; cf. also Richardson