Chapters 1–4 have set out a model for how change happened in the eleventh and earlier twelfth centuries. According to this, lords took business away from the communal courts of shire and especially of hundred. They did so either by taking control of hundred courts by various means, or by creating courts that were purely for their own dependents, and which did not match existing hundreds. The latter were mostly created through subtracting business from the hundred courts, which meant a rearrangement of power relationships between lords and their dependents. If someone’s tenure of land was witnessed through a lord’s court, then that tenure relied on the link to the lord. The creation of new courts had many consequences for the process of manorialisation, but had others for the hundreds themselves. Business had been taken away to other fora; attendees at the hundred no longer made their way there as often as they once had. If these processes had been pushed further, it was possible that shire and hundred might have petered out in England as fully as the mallus had in France. If so, this would have had substantial consequences for royal authority, for the hundred was a principal vehicle for the implementation and recognition of royal commands and authority. Without the hundred, kings would have had to work through the lords who controlled their courts to gain access to their dependents, or make claims over them. The point of lords’ courts, after all, was to prevent others gaining access to them.

Yet this did not happen. Hundreds survived, and continued to meet and operate. That they did so depended on some decisions made early in Henry I’s reign, and on some ideas which allowed for the diversifying landscape of courts to be organised in the king’s interest. First, kings asserted that the hundreds belonged to them. It is probable that earlier kings had regarded hundreds as in some sense theirs, for hundreds carried out their commands; but they did not state this explicitly, and hundreds had not been run by any royal reeve or representative. The royal claim over the hundreds subverted their communal nature, and turned them into a lordship court, in which they were run in the interests of the kings as lords.