These financial functions of the censors gave rise to an administrative jurisdiction. In their guardianship of public places they decided where private buildings had encroached on state property,[1121] or where public buildings had been usurped by _privati_.[1122] They may at times have pronounced on the pecuniary penalties meant to enforce the rights of public property, for they sometimes exercised their coercive power and proclaimed varying penalties (_multae_) to compel obedience;[1123] but such quasi-criminal jurisdiction must have been exercised more frequently by the aediles, and, where the amount of the fine necessitated the appeal, it must have been pronounced and defended by the latter magistrates. Jurisdiction bearing a resemblance to that of civil law was concerned with the _ultro tributa_, when the question arose whether a contract had been carried out satisfactorily or not, and with disputes about the public land, the controversy in the latter case lying most frequently between the _publicanus_ and the _possessor_,[1124] but sometimes, no doubts between one who claimed to be an owner on the one hand and the middleman or an occupant on the other. The form of this jurisdiction varied. Sometimes, when the dispute lay between the state and an individual, as in the controversies about the _ultro tributa_, the sentence was the result of a purely magisterial cognisance, although we may suppose that the censor could, if he pleased, give a _judex_ in such a case. Where the dispute lay between two _privati_, even though one of them had the quasi-official position of a _publicanus_, the granting of a _judex_ or _recuperatores_ was, at least in the later Republic, usual.[1125] _The plebeian Magistrates_ The accidental preservation of the tribunate, through the failure of the decemvirate to do its work, and consequently of the plebeian assembly in all its purity, led to the persistence of a magistracy chosen only by and only from the Plebs. But the plebeian aedileship was welded with the curule office of the same name into practically a single magistracy, which has already been discussed;[1126] while the tribunate is so intimately bound up with every phase of the constitutional development and organisation of Rome, that every one of its leading functions has already been considered.