This is a clear misinterpretation of the intention of Magna Carta. The Exchequer never “followed the Crown”; it stayed at Westminster where its offices, tallies, and pipe rolls were. The Charter would have expressed itself in widely different words if it had desired to exclude common pleas from the Exchequer. The _Articuli super Cartas_, however, attempted what the Charter of 1215 did not. After 1300 it was clearly illegal to hold any pleas in the Exchequer, unless such as affected the Crown and its ministers. Subsequent statutes confirmed this; but their plain intention was always defeated by the ingenious use of legal fictions and the connivance of the Barons of Exchequer, who welcomed the increase of their fees which kept pace with the increase of business.[546] ----- Footnote 546: The fiction of “Crown debtors” is well known: plaintiffs obtained a hearing in the Exchequer for their common pleas by alleging that they wished to recover debts due to them “in order to enable them to answer the debts they owed to the king.” See Madox, II. 192. ----- The evil directly attacked by Magna Carta was something quite different—an evil wider, more pressing and less technical, namely, the practice of causing ordinary litigants, with their legal advisers and witnesses, to dance attendance on a constantly moving court. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. Recogniciones de nova dissaisina, de morte antecessoris, et de ultima presentacione, non capiantur nisi in suis comitatibus et hoc modo; nos, vel si extra regnum fuerimus, capitalis justiciarius noster, mittemus duos justiciarios per unumquemque comitatum per quatuor vices in anno, qui, cum quatuor militibus cujuslibet comitatus electis per comitatum, capiant in comitatu et in die et loco comitatus assisas predictas. Inquests of _novel disseisin_, of _mort d’ancestor_, and of _darrein presentment_, shall not be held elsewhere than in their own county-courts,[547] and that in manner following,—We, or, if we should be out of the realm, our chief justiciar, will send two justiciars through every county four times a year, who shall, along with four knights of the county chosen by the county, hold the said assizes[548] in the county court, on the day and in the place of meeting of that court. ----- Footnote 547: “_Comitatus_” indicates both the county where the lands lay and the court of that county. It was originally the sphere of influence of a comes or earl. Cf. _supra_, c. 2, (p. 238, n.) Footnote 548: “The _said_ assizes” were previously called, not assizes but “inquests” (_recogniciones_), a wider term of which the three petty assizes here named were three special applications. -----