All three of the Courts of Common Law—the Court of King’s Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, and the Court of Exchequer—were thus offshoots of the king’s household. In theory, each of these ought to have confined itself to the special class of suits to which it owed its origin—to royal pleas, common pleas, and exchequer pleas respectively; but by a process well known to lawyers and law-courts in all ages, each of them eagerly encroached on the jurisdictions and the fees appropriate to the others, until they became, for most purposes, three sister courts of similar and co-ordinate authority. They were bound to decide all suits according to the technical and inflexible rules of common law; and their jurisdiction thus required a supplement, which was supplied by the genesis of the Court of Chancery, dispensing, not common law, but equity, which professed to give (and, for a short time, actually did give) redress on the merits of each case as it arose, unrestrained by precedents and legal subtleties. IV. _The Evolution of the Court of Common Pleas._ The comment usually made upon the present chapter is that we have here the origin of the Court of Common Pleas. Now, legal institutions do not spring, full-fledged, into being. The Court of Common Pleas, like its sister Courts of King’s Bench and Exchequer, was the result of a long process of gradual separation from a common parent stem. Prior to 1215 several tentative efforts seem to have been made towards establishing each of these. On the other hand, it is probable, nay certain, that long after 1215 the Court of Common Pleas did not completely shake off either its early dependence upon the _Curia Regis_, or yet its close connection with its sister tribunals. Three stages in the process of evolution may be emphasized. (1) The earliest trace of the existence of a definite bench of judges, set apart for trying common pleas, is to be found in 1178, not in 1215. When Henry II. returned from Normandy in the former year, he found that there had been irregularities in his absence. To prevent their recurrence, he effected certain changes in his judicial arrangements, the exact nature of which is matter of dispute. A contemporary writer[538] relates how Henry chose two clerks and three laymen from the officials of his own household, and gave to these five men authority to hear all complaints and to do right “_and not to recede from his court_.” It was long thought that this marked the origin of the Court of King’s Bench, but Mr. Pike[539] has conclusively proved that the bench thus established was the predecessor, not of the royal bench, but rather of the bench for common pleas. ----- Footnote 538: The chronicler known as Benedict Abbot, I. 107 (Rolls Series). Footnote 539: _House of Lords_, 32. -----