A Concise History of the Common Law. Theodore F. T. Plucknett

refer to by its old Latin style of the Curia Regis) it may be well to examine the various meanings of the word “court” or “curia”. The original sense of the word is the rectangular open space around which the mediaeval house was built; the usual plan was that of a hollow square of buildings, the inside space of which was called the court. The colleges at Oxford and Cambridge are all built upon this plan, which was originally that of the ordinary dwelling-house, and in Cambridge their interior spaces are still called courts. The next development is to extend the word “court” to the house itself, and many famous houses in England are still called courts—Hampton Court, for example. Then the word “court” can also be used of the household and personal attendants of a king or great noble. Upon certain festivals during the year kings and nobles were accustomed to gather around them a particularly large company, and this event, too, becomes known as a court; the word will serve furthermore to designate the persons who were present on such an occasion. At Christmas and Easter the Anglo-Norman kings held courts of this character. The word was also applied to those assemblies at which attendance was compulsory as a feudal duty, and thence by a natural transition to any assembly for the purpose of transacting important public business; the Bank of England is governed by a court, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by a General Court. Finally, the word “court” is particularly used of such assemblies when they are engaged in judicial business. In mediaeval usage the word “court” may bear any of these different meanings singly or in combination, and if mediaeval institutions are to be understood properly it must be remembered that a court might be at the same time legislative, judicial, deliberative, and even festive.

      It was all the more easy to combine these different functions in one body because early courts were very different from modern ones. The central figure of a court to-day is the judge, but, as we shall see later,¹ it required some time before English law developed this office. Feudal courts seem generally to have consisted not of judges but of a number of “suitors” with whom rested the decision. The lord of the court indeed presided in person or more usually by his steward, but the president was in no sense a judge as the word is understood to-day. Under the Norman kings, we have descriptions of trials where it plainly appears that the king himself demanded of his barons in the court to pronounce a judgment.² His lords, as we have seen, had courts of their own. Like the royal courts, these seignorial courts could sometimes take a political appearance, and from time to time we find lords holding assemblies of tenants like little parliaments in order to obtain grants of money.³ The House of Lords when sitting as a criminal court preserved, at least in theory, this old conception of a court of many suitors who are judges, irrespective of their being professional lawyers, and exactly reproduced an old feudal court of barons who are judges, while the presiding officer (the steward of the lord—in this case the King’s Lord High Steward) is merely chairman.⁴

THE ANGLO-NORMAN CURIA REGIS

The court of the Anglo-Norman kings consisted, therefore, of the Anglo-Saxon Witan, which was essentially deliberative in character, radically transformed by the infusion of Norman ideas. There is a long and somewhat fruitless discussion as to whether the Norman Curia Regis is or is not the same institution as the Anglo-Saxon Witan; in this form the question can hardly be answered. It seems rather to have been the fact that the formless and indefinite Witan was so thoroughly transformed by the Norman kings that it is purely a matter of fancy whether one describes the product as a new institution or as a modification of the old one.

      There are cases to be found where the Witan, under the Anglo-Saxon kings, exercised quasi-judicial functions; it is perfectly clear, however, that the Witan did not entertain the ambition of becoming a national court. The whole spirit of Anglo-Saxon law made for the maintenance of local institutions, and more than once we find laws prohibiting parties to appeal to the King unless there has been a grave default of justice in the regular courts. When judicial matters do appear before the King and the Witan they are apt to be treated as political disputes requiring a political solution by negotiation, compromise, and royal mediation rather than a strictly judicial treatment. With the Norman Conquest we begin to find the transformation of the deliberative Witan into the judicial court. The transformation was, of course, slow, and even after the conquest there are proceedings in the King’s Court of the more ancient type. Still, the feudal idea of a court of tenants-in-chief was sufficient to supply the model of a supreme royal court, and it was from that model that the judicial system of the common law later developed.

THE TRAVELLING COURT: JUSTICES IN EYRE

It was a feature of mediaeval life that the King and his court were constantly travelling through the length and breadth of the kingdom, and that in the course of these journeys a general supervision would be effected over the conduct of royal officers, the working of local institutions, the collection of revenue and the redress of grievances. It was only natural that the idea should be extended, and that kings should send out some trusted officer to conduct similar progresses through the country for the same general purposes. Charlemagne in the early ninth century had developed a regular system of such missi dominici,¹ and very soon after the Conquest, as we have already seen,² a similar device is found in England. At the head of this travelling group of officials were the Justiciars—and it must be remembered that their title does not imply that their duties were primarily judicial, but merely that they were the direct personal representatives of the King.³ The King’s Court was thus enabled to be in several places at once; besides the principal body, which was always in the presence of the King himself, there might be several groups of officials touring the country as Justices in Eyre, as they soon came to be called. In this way the custom and practice of the King’s Court was made more familiar by being spread over the country, and by being brought into contact with local institutions. During the reign of Henry II these Eyres are very frequent, and Bracton and his successors treat them as a separate judicial jurisdiction.¹ The experiment was so successful that Philip Augustus soon set up a similar system in France.² There can be no doubt that there was much important legislation effected (which is now largely lost) by means of instructions to the justices as they set out upon their Eyre.

      Their jurisdiction varied; in the early years of Henry III they might be commissioned “ad omnia placita”, and then their impressive “general eyre” (as Maitland called it³) became in effect the court of common pleas on circuit, instead of at Westminster. These justices with their “roll of secrets” and their “book of death”⁴ undoubtedly struck terror into the country,⁵ but as their organisation became more refined they became more and more an engine of oppression. Technical errors in legal and administrative procedure, slight inaccuracies in matters of detail were made the excuse for fines upon the whole vill or county. In the thirteenth century Eyres were frequent⁶ and the financial yield considerable: in 1227 a judge reckoned a profit of 40 marks a day for the king, and in 1301 Edward I “caused justice to be done on malefactors” in order to recoup the expenses of twenty years of war, and thereby “amassed great treasure”.⁷ In the early fourteenth century we have a full report of an Eyre which visited Kent in 1313 from which every detail of its work can be traced.⁸ Already protests against general Eyres appear in Parliament and after the middle of the century Eyres ceased to be commissioned. For a time it seemed as if the new device of constant tours by the King’s Bench from the middle of the fourteenth century onwards might serve the same purposes as an eyre,⁹ but in the end it was seen that they were in fact no longer necessary, for (as we shall see in the next chapter) newer means were being developed which put local institutions under an even more effective control, while the rise of parliamentary taxation provided a more satisfactory source of revenue.

THE LINES OF SEPARATION

      The King’s Court, however, still remained constantly at work in his presence, and the development of the jurisdiction of the Eyre did not seriously diminish the powers exercisable in the King’s Court proper. It soon became evident, however, that convenience required a certain amount of specialisation within the Curia Regis.¹ It is curious to remark, however, that the divisions were