[541]. See Maitland, Ibid.
[542]. See Maitland, Sel. Pl. Crown, xviii.
[543]. See Placitorum Abbreviatio (p. 105) 21 Henry III., cited Pike, House of Lords, p. 41. Cf. also Bracton’s Note Book, pleas Nos. 1213 and 1220.
[544]. 28 Edward I. c. 5.
[545]. See 28 Edward I. c. 4. Many previous attempts had been made to keep common pleas out of the Exchequer e.g. the writs of 56 Henry III. and 5 Edward I. (cited Madox, II. 73-4) the so-called statute of Rhuddlan (12 Edward I., see Statutes of Realm, I. 70). Madox also (II. 73-4) takes the erroneous view that c. 17 of the Great Charter relates to the Exchequer; so does Mr. Bigelow (History of Procedure, 130–1), who goes further astray by explaining the point of the grievance as the difficulty of getting speedy justice at the Exchequer, because the barons refused to sit after their fiscal business had been finished, at the Easter and Michaelmas sessions. This is an error: the Barons of Exchequer made no difficulty about hearing pleas: quite the contrary. Plaintiffs were equally eager to purchase the writs which they were keen to sell: it was only defendants (debtors) who objected to the rapid and stringent procedure for enforcing payment adopted by this efficient court. The sheriffs and others waiting to render accounts before the Exchequer also protested against the congestion of business produced at the Exchequer by the eagerness of litigants who pressed there for justice. See Madox, II. 73. Plaintiffs had no reason to complain.
[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.
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.
Provision is thus made for holding before the king’s travelling justices, frequently and in a convenient manner, three species of judicial inquests known as “the three petty assizes.” These are of exceptional interest, not only in relation to Magna Carta, but from their intimate connection with several constitutional problems of prime importance; with the reforms of Henry II. on the one hand, and with the genesis of trial by jury and of the Justices of Assize on the other.