Glanvill's disciplinary jurisdiction was considered first partly to give substance to propositions hard to reckon with when stated in the abstract. For us, property rights have some absolute existence; and the jurisdiction protecting them is a secondary matter having no effect upon the substantive rules. The legal system may allocate a dispute concerning my house to this court or to that; but the same rules will be applied and the same results reached. On this basis we have assumed that the growth of royal jurisdiction over land was a process of transfer, analogous to the transfer of personal actions from local to royal courts. Whether the desire was that of royal officials or of litigants, what happened was that claims formerly made in lords' courts came to be made in the king's; and though they might there receive more sophisticated treatment, especially in the matter of proof, the same justice would be done and the same result reached. The new jurisdiction was set up alongside the old, its superiority important only for the political reason that lords could not stop it. The operating relationship was one of rivalry between parallel institutions making little direct contact with each other.

But if the original role of novel disseisin was that depicted in the preceding chapter, the original relationship was entirely direct: it was one of control. The assize was a response not to a failing seignorial order for which some alternative must be provided, but to an order which had been sovereign within its own sphere and was subject to sovereign abuse.