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

duties was made whereby finance went to the Exchequer, legislation to Parliament, judicature to the courts and executive duties to the Council, but this classification of powers was never very strictly carried out. Parliament and Exchequer both had considerable judicial business. The courts did a certain amount of administrative work, and the Council had a large share in judicature as well as in legislation. The development of these different bodies, therefore, was not dictated primarily by any idea of the classification, and still less of the separation, of powers. It seems rather that the growth of these new institutions was determined along lines of administrative procedure. Types of business of frequent occurrence would necessarily encourage the development of a routine, which would enable subordinate officials (if properly instructed in a well-planned procedure) to do the work in a regular, though somewhat mechanical way. The bulk of their duties consisted in following a preordained mode of practice, and it is only in exceptional cases that they would find it necessary to invoke the discretion of the whole of the King’s Court. We therefore find very soon the development of certain courses of administrative practice, and around these practices there naturally gathered a group of officials who were skilled in the conduct of them. It is such a group of officials, adept in a particular body of procedural rules, which forms the first beginnings of new departments or institutions. The reason for their existence and the key to their activities is therefore a body of administrative procedure rather than a theoretical analysis of the powers of government. In the course of time a number of such procedures appear, gather around them a little group of officials, and finally give rise to new institutions.

THE OLDEST OFF-SHOOT: THE EXCHEQUER

      The first of these was the Exchequer, which represents the oldest routine of government. Its beginnings had been primitive.

      “Edward the Confessor kept his treasure in his bedroom so that the thief, who aspired to rob the national treasury, had to wait until the king took an after dinner nap before he could venture into the royal chamber, and extract from the king’s treasure chest some portion of its precious contents.”¹

      Within a century there was a well-organised department, and in the reign of Henry II the Exchequer, with its formal departmental seal, had become the first separate government department in Europe.² About the year 1179 it was possible to write a very substantial treatise upon Exchequer procedure.³ That procedure was primarily designed to do the King’s book-keeping and to watch his financial interests, but it was inevitable that many other matters should also arise. In the Exchequer twice a year all the great officials of the realm sat together to supervise the whole of the financial machinery. At its head sat the Justiciar, and when that office became extinct he was replaced by the Treasurer; the Chancellor also attended and brought with him some of his clerks who issued process “from the Chancery in the Exchequer”. At the close of the twelfth century the Chancellor’s office had become so important in other directions that for the future he is only represented in the Exchequer by a deputy, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. With such a great array of high officials at the solemn meeting of the Exchequer, it was natural that any great difficulty could be immediately settled, for the highest authorities in the land were sitting around the table. In this way, a good deal of important government business of a general character was apt to take place on the occasion of a great Exchequer meeting, especially at Michaelmas term, when besides all the high officials there were also in attendance all the sheriffs who were present for the examination of their accounts.

      In the first of these administrative routines, therefore, we see that a variety of functions were performed whose single bond of union was the fact that they arose in the course of one procedure, that of the Exchequer.

THE NEXT OFF-SHOOT: THE COURT OF COMMON PLEAS

      We have already mentioned the very numerous Eyres which took place during Henry II’s reign. Indeed the popular complaint was that there were too many of them, and in 1178 we find a remarkable passage in a chronicler⁴ which tells us that—

      “While he was staying in England, the King enquired whether the justices whom he had set up in England had treated the people fairly; and when he learned that the country and the people were much aggrieved by the number of justices (for there were eighteen of them), by the advice of the wise men of his realm he chose five only, two clergy and three laymen, all of his personal household, and decreed that these five should hear all the complaints of the realm, and do right, and not depart from the King’s court but remain there to hear the people’s complaints. And if any question should arise among them which they could not solve, they were to bring it up in the royal hearing for determination according to the pleasure of the King and the wiser men of the realm.”

      The current interpretation of this passage, first suggested by Maitland and later modified by Pike and Adams, is that in 1178 Henry II by a deliberate act established a new court, which in later times became known as the Court of Common Pleas. Adams¹ insists that the powers of this court, like those of its descendant, the later Court of Common Pleas, were strictly limited, and that it was expressly debarred from exercising that wide discretion which was the privilege of the Curia Regis. The “limitations”, however, were not of the sort we would associate to-day with the expression “limited jurisdiction”. As Holdsworth points out, in criticising Adams’ view, the new court in fact entertained every sort of business (including occasional pleas of the crown).² The situation seems best described as the effective, but informal, subordination of the new justices to the king and his court of “wiser” men, rather than limitation to a precise list of powers. Its foundation was suggested by the experience of the Justices in Eyre, and was designed to render available all the time the judicial advantages of the intermittent or occasional Eyre, while, on the other hand, the high-handed action of certain of those justices was to be prevented by subjecting the new court to the supervision of the king’s council and by confining it within the limits of a procedure which was soon to become comparatively strict. The result was to give the public access to royal justice which was no longer mingled with the financial functions of the Eyre. The fact that this body of judges was erected as a separate court³ was not allowed to stand in the way of practical convenience, however, and if for any reason it became desirable to move a case backwards and forwards between the newly erected court and the body which met around the king himself, then there was nothing to prevent such a course. This event of 1178 must not be regarded as a sudden creation of a new court by an act of legislation, but rather as the culmination of a number of earlier experiments,⁴ which all had the general characteristic of subjecting the itinerant justices to the limitations set out in their commissions or instructions.¹

Maitland discerned signs in the middle of the twelfth century of an old oral and traditional formalism,² which by the end of the century has developed into a written and authoritative formalism—the writ-system of the common law which Glanvill described in some detail; and, as Professor Baldwin remarks, such limitations are appropriate to the new body of 1178, and not to the Curia Regis itself.

      “It must be understood that the so-called formulaic and restrictive procedure began, and could begin, only in the courts held by the royal commissioners—that is, first by the itinerant justices and then the central court established on similar lines.”³

      It was a notable feature of the new arrangement of 1178 that the justices were to remain with the King; that necessarily meant perpetual perambulation. On the other hand, the “chief court”, capitalis curia, whose practice is the subject of Glanvill’s treatise (written soon after 1187), seems fairly fixed at Westminster. Professor Sayles expresses a doubt whether the five justices of 1178 are indeed the same institution as that which Glanvill described, and suggests that the latter may be “a different creation”. It may be; there were indeed many “creations”. The difficulty largely disappears when one remembers that these “creations” were casual, temporary expedients, with no similarity to a “creation” of a court by a modern act of parliament. The repetition of these expedients slowly resulted in an institution, and its settlement at Westminster naturally resulted from Henry II’s absence abroad, which made it impossible to stay with the king and at the same time to hear