The whole administration of justice was corrupt.

The decisions of the King's courts were as arbitrary as the methods employed to enforce sentence.

Free men were arrested, evicted, exiled, and outlawed without even legal warrant or the semblance of a fair trial.

All the machinery of government set up by the Norman kings, and developed under Henry II., had, in John's hands, become a mere instrument of despotic extortion, to be used against anybody and everybody, from earl to villein, who could be fleeced by the King's servants.
John saw the tide rising against him, and endeavoured to divide barons from Churchmen by proclaiming that the latter should have free and undisturbed right of election when bishoprics and other ecclesiastical offices were vacant.

But the attempt failed.