The Royal Court spawned several courts with different specialties and became more like departments of state than offices of the King's household. The justices were career civil servants knowledgeable in the civil and canon law. The Court of the King's Bench (a marble slab in Westminster upon which the throne was placed) traveled with the king and primarily heard criminal cases and pleas of the Crown. Any use of force, however trivial, was interpreted as breach of the royal peace and could be brought before the King's Bench. Its records were the coram rege rolls. The Court of Common Pleas primarily heard civil cases brought by one subject against another. Pursuant to the Magna Carta, it sat only at one place, the Great Hall in Westminster. It had concurrent jurisdiction with the King's Bench over trespass cases. Its records were the de banco rolls. The Court of the Exchequer with its subsidiary department of the Treasury was in almost permanent session at Westminster, primarily collecting the Crown's revenue and enforcing the Crown's rights. A department of the Exchequer watched over the affairs of the Jews. There was no sharp line demarking the jurisdictions of these courts. No pleas could be brought against the king; rather a petition was addressed to him, which he would answer by an executive writ. Appeals from these courts could be made to the king and/or his small council. In 1234, the justiciar as the principal royal executive officer and chief presiding officer over the Royal Court ended. In 1268, a chief justiciar was appointed to hold pleas before the king. About the same time the presiding justice of the Court of Common Pleas also came to be styled chief justice. Henceforth, a justiciar was a royal officer who dealt only with judicial work. The justiciars were no longer statesmen or politicians, but rather men learned in the law. Membership in or attendance at the great council or parliament no longer rested upon feudal tenure, but upon a writ of summons which was, to a degree, dependent on the royal will. Crown pleas included issues of the King's property, fines due to him, murder (a body found with no witnesses to a killing), homicide (a killing for which there were witnesses), rape, wounding, mayhem, consorting, larceny, robbery, burglary, arson, poaching, unjust imprisonment, selling cloth by nonstandard widths, selling wine by nonstandard weights. Crown causes were pled by the king's serjeants or servants at law, who were not clerics. Apprentices at law learned pleading from them.