Our Legal Heritage: King AEthelbert - King George III, 600 A.D. - 1776Reilly, S. A.
History
Our Legal Heritage: King AEthelbert - King George III, 600 A.D. - 1776
Reilly, S. A.
Law -- England -- History
There were local courts of the vill, borough, manor, hundred,
county, sheriff, escheator, and royal bailiff, with overlapping
jurisdictions. The county court in its full session, that is, as it
attended the itinerant justices on their visitation, contained the
archbishops, bishops, priors, earls, barons, knights, and freeholders,
and from each township four men and the reeve, and from each borough
twelve burgesses. It was still the folkmote, the general assembly of
the people. In 1293, suitors who could not spend 40s. a year within
their county were not required to attend their county court.
The most common plea in the hundred court was trespass. It also
heard issues concerning services arising out of land, detention of
chattels, small debts, wounding or maiming of animals, and personal
assaults and brawls not amounting to felony. It met every three weeks.
The sheriff held his turn twice a year and viewed frankpledge once a
year.
In Chancery, the court of the Chancellor, if there is a case
with no remedy specified in the law, that is similar to a situation for
which there is a writ, then a new writ may be made for that case. This
was called "trespass on the case". This covered indirect as well as
direct contact with a person, land, or chattels. An example is that
trespasss would not apply to a boat whose rope attaching it to land was
cut because the trespass did not have contact with the boat. Only the
rope would be the result of the trespass. Trespass on the case would
include the boat. The two chancery justices were the Lord Chancellor
and the Master of the Rolls.
When Edward I came to the throne, over half of the
approximately 600 hundred courts had gone under the jurisdiction of a
private lord owing to royal charter, prescriptive right, and
usurpation. The sheriff's powers in these hundreds varied. In some, the
sheriff had no right of entry. So Edward I created the writ of Quo
Warranto [by what right], by which all landholders exercising manor or
franchise jurisdictions must bring their ancestors' charters before a
traveling justice for the Common Pleas for examination and
interpretation as to whether they had a charter or were going beyond
their charters and infringing upon the jurisdiction of the Royal Court.
As a result, many manor courts were confined to manorial matters and
could no longer view frankpledge or hear criminal cases, which were
reserved for the royal courts. In the manor courts which retained
criminal jurisdiction, there was a reassertion of the obligation to
have present a royal coroner, whose duty it was to see that royal
rights were not infringed and that the goods of felons were given to
the Crown and not kept by the lords. Some who could not produce a
charter lost it; but later, uninterrupted use of a jursdiction since
1189 sufficed to retain that jurisdiction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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