II. _Common Pleas and Royal Pleas._ Long before 1215 all litigations conducted before the king’s courts had come to be divided roughly into two classes, according as the royal interests were or were not specially affected by the issue. Those on one side of this fluctuating line were known as royal pleas, or “pleas of the Crown,” provisions for holding which are contained in chapter 24, those on the other side as ordinary pleas or “common pleas,” to which alone the present chapter refers. As these ordinary suits did not require to be determined in the royal presence, it was therefore possible to appoint a special bench of judges to sit permanently in some fixed spot, to be selected once for all as likely to suit the convenience of litigants. No town was named in Magna Carta; but Westminster, even then the natural home of law, was probably intended from the first. It is Westminster that Sir Frederick Pollock has in mind when he writes in reference to this chapter: “We may also say that Magna Carta gave England a capital.”[535] The barons in 1215, however, in asking this reform, were not insisting on any startling innovation, but demanding merely the strict observance of a rule long recognized. During most of John’s reign, a court did sit at Westminster dispensing justice, with more or less regularity; and there most “common pleas” were tried, unless John ordered otherwise.[536] Magna Carta insisted that all exceptions must cease; the rule of law must supersede the royal caprice. ----- Footnote 535: _Jurisprudence and Ethics_, 209. Sometimes, however, another “fixed place” was substituted. The Court of Common Pleas once sat at York under Edward III. and at Hertford under Elizabeth. See Maitland, _Select Pleas of the Crown_, xiii. The Statute 2 Edward III. c. 11, enacted that it should not be removed to any new place without due notice. Footnote 536: See Prof. Maitland, _Select Pleas of the Crown_, xiii.-xvi.