Fines and the Common Bench, 1218–1226
Keywords:
nascent, The extensive extant records, judicial system, royal governance, proceduresAbstract
The years immediately following the issue of Magna Carta and the death of John were of fundamental importance in determining the trajectory of the nascent common law legal system. Although the existence of the Bench had functionally been permanently established under chapter seventeen of Magna Carta, the central royal court faced an uncertain future under conciliar rule and in the aftermath of extensive civil conflict. The extensive extant records of the common law fines made to initiate actions in the Bench as recorded the Fine Rolls offer a window into the roles played by the court in relation to litigants, within the wider structure of royal governance, and in relation to a rapidly evolving legal system. An analysis of these sources can therefore both illuminate the early workings of the common law legal procedures and characterize the demand for royal justice that survived the First Barons’ War before continuing to grow across the thirteenth century. What emerges is a picture of a judicial system at the onset of a period of rapid development and widespread demand that would come to lay the foundation for the massive expansion of royal justice that was to follow throughout the reign of Henry III and beyond.
References
1
Doris Stenton, Rolls of the Justices in Eyre: Being the Rolls of Pleas and Assizes for Yorkshire in 3 Henry III (London: Quaritch, 1937), xi; Doris Stenton, Rolls of the Justices in Eyre for Lincolnshire (1218–1219) and Worcestershire (1221) (London: Quaritch, 1934), xxxvi. This great eyre was divided into two halves, with the first ordered in November 1218 and the second in May 1221. The first circuit included orders to the sheriffs of all counties with the exception of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Staffordshire, Shrewsbury, Leicestershire, Warwickshire, and Surrey. Stenton, Lincolnshire and Worcestershire, xxxvii. The second commissioned a circuit to visit the counties of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Wiltshire, and Cornwall, thus completing the kingdom-wide judicial tour. Stenton, Lincolnshire and Worcestershire, xlvii; M. T. Clanchy, “Magna Carta and the Common Pleas,” in Studies in Medieval History Presented to R. H. C. Davis, ed. Henry Mayr-Harting and R. I. Moore (London: Hambledon Press, 1985), 224–25.
2
Judges were developing the scope of actions and increasing the influence of the royal court by making every possible use of jurors. Doris Stenton, Rolls of the Justices in Eyre: Being the Rolls of Pleas and Assizes for Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Staffordshire, 1221, 1222 (London: Quaritch, 1940), liv; see Clanchy on the reestablishment of the Bench in 1218 as a restoration of normalcy. M. T. Clanchy, England and Its Rulers: 1066 – 1307 (Newark: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 220; administration of justice practically ceased when the war began. Stenton, Lincolnshire and Worcestershire, xxxvi.
3
Court of Common Pleas and King’s Bench, and Justices Itinerant: Early Plea and Essoin Rolls (KB 26), National Archives, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C10030 (accessed 13 March 2024); Henry III, Anglo-American Legal Tradition, http://aalt.law.uh.edu/HenryIII.html (accessed 13 March 2024). These plea roll entries have been transcribed in the Curia Regis Rolls (CRR) series. The volumes covering the period examined in this study include: Curia Regis Rolls of the Reign of Henry III Volume VIII (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1938); Curia Regis Rolls of the Reign of Henry III Volume IX (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1952); Curia Regis Rolls of the Reign of Henry III Volume X (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1949); Stenton, Yorkshire, xi–xiii; Stenton, Lincolnshire and Worcestershire, xxxviii; Stenton, Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Staffordshire, xi; for an overview of the 1218–1222 eyre visitations see David Crook, Records of the General Eyre (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1982), 71–78.
4
Paul Brand discusses the benefits that use of the fine rolls offer to the legal historian at length in Paul Brand, “The Fine Rolls of Henry III as a Source for the Legal Historian,” in The Growth of Royal Government under Henry III, ed. David Crook and Louise Wilkinson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press 2015).
5
Brand, “Fine Rolls,” 44–54; Tony Moore, “The Fine Rolls as Evidence for the Expansion of Royal Justice during the Reign of Henry III,” in The Growth of Royal Government under Henry III, ed. David Crook and Louise Wilkinson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press 2015), 55–71; David Carpenter, “Between Magna Carta and the Parliamentary State: The Fine Rolls of King Henry III, 1216–72,” in The Growth of Royal Government under Henry III, ed. David Crook and Louise Wilkinson (Woodbridge: Boydell Press 2015), 9.
6
The growth in the volume of common law litigation across the thirteenth century is explored by Tony Moore in his analysis of both plea rotuli and judicial fine roll entries. Moore, “Evidence,” 55–71.
7
Carpenter, “Between,” and Moore, “Evidence” are the two most closely related studies in terms of methodological approach. Both seek to utilize the fine rolls to shed light on the development of the common law judicial system in the thirteenth century.
8
Brand describes fines as being made by individual litigants in order to ensure that cases that may have otherwise gone to local courts—or that were already being heard before those courts—are instead heard in the central courts. He also highlights the practice of making fines for the hearing of a plea before a “foreign” sitting of the general eyre. Brand, “Fine Rolls,” 44. For the foundational importance to the common law of procedure by writ see R. C. van Caenegem, The Birth of the English Common Law (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988), 29–61.
9
As documents of a legal nature the plea rolls contain extremely useful information about the course of a case. They do not, however, contain the information related to the amount rendered to initiate the case that will be utilized in this study in the manner of the fine rolls. The plea rolls are additionally both massively voluminous and have survived to the present in a much more piecemeal fashion than have the fine rolls. Moore, “Evidence,” 57.
10
Ralph Turner, The King and His Courts: The Role of John and Henry III in the Administration of Justice, 1199–1240 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 23; Clanchy, “Magna Carta,” 228–29.
11
Clanchy clarifies that the close association between the Bench and chapter seventeen of Magna Carta was a later evolution meant to safeguard the jurisdictional existence of the Bench itself. He argues that the chapter served as a foundation of both the Bench and eyre in this period, and that the common pleas referenced in the chapter apply more to the sittings of the eyre than to the Bench. Clanchy, “Magna Carta,” 219–32.
12
Turner, King and His Courts, 25; David Carpenter, Henry III: The Rise to Power and Personal Rule 1207–1258 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020): 153; Clanchy, “Magna Carta,” 222; for the quintessential discussion of the newly renewed court coram rege see C. A. F. Meekings and David Crook, King’s Bench and Common Bench in the Reign of Henry III (London: Selden Society, 2010), 19–33.
13
For a description of a general eyre see Carpenter, Henry III: Rise and Rule, 51; the Bench and the eyres can essentially be understood as two iterations or venues of the same royal court system in the years immediately following Magna Carta. With that said the two types of sitting were certainly distinct from one another, and Clanchy describes the authority of the eyre as both more established and wide-ranging than that of the Bench. Clanchy, “Magna Carta,” 223.
14
Moore’s findings indicate that while the number of overall rotuli comprising the plea rolls in a given year was lower in 1218 than it had been in 1212, it was still higher than in any of the other previous years. Moore, “Evidence,” 59. While regular judicial activity resumed to a degree at Westminster in 1214, the war and the death of John would continue to cause disruptions until 1218. Clanchy, “Magna Carta,” 230.
15
Robert Palmer, The County Courts of Medieval England, 1150–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 141–73. Palmer’s definitive discussion of the jurisdictional connections between the county and central royal courts identifies a number of avenues through which litigation might come from the one into the other and argues that this process was pivotal in the gradual emergence of a common English legal system.
16
Palmer, County Courts, 145–47.
17
Palmer, County Courts, 149–52, 232.
18
See above.
19
Moore, “Evidence,” 61.
20
The de gratia fines themselves were likely made later on after the moment of procurement. Carpenter, “Between,” 10. Fines for writs de cursu, however, were far more standardized and were likely purchased at the initial stage of the litigation.
