[629]. Ibid., p. 6.
[630]. Ibid., p. 16.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.
Nullus vicecomes, constabularius, coronatores, vel alii ballivi nostri, teneant placita corone nostre.
No sheriff, constable, coroners, or others of our bailiffs, shall hold pleas of our Crown.
The main object of this provision is beyond doubt: men accused of crimes must be tried before the king’s judges and not by local magistrates of whatsoever kind. The innocent looked confidently for justice to the representatives of the central government; while they dreaded the jurisdiction of the less responsible officials resident in the county—local tyrants whose harshness had earned them a hearty and widespread hatred. The sheriffs and castellans thoroughly deserved their bad reputation; for the records of the age overflow with tales of their cruelties and illegal oppressions. It ought not to be forgotten, however, that if this chapter contains a condemnation of the local administration of justice, it testifies, at the same time, to the comparative purity of the justice dispensed by the king’s own judges. So far there is no difficulty; but some differences of opinion exist as to the exact bearing of this provision on certain points of detail.
I. Pleas of the Crown. All litigations tended to be distinguished into two kinds, royal pleas and common pleas, according as the interests of the Crown were or were not specially involved. This classification has already been discussed in connection with chapter 17, which sought to regulate the procedure in common pleas. The present chapter concerns itself only with “pleas of the Crown,” a phrase which had even in 1215 considerably altered its original meaning. In the eleventh century it had denoted all royal business, whether specially relating to legal procedure or not, embracing all matters connected with the king’s household or his estates, with the collection of his revenue, or the administration of his justice, civil as well as criminal. Gradually, however, the usage of the word altered in two respects, contracting in one direction, while expanding in another. It ceased to be applied to financial business and even to non-criminal, judicial business; and it was thereafter reserved for criminal trials held before the king’s judges. This process of contraction had been nearly completed before the accession of John.
Another tendency, however, in an opposite direction had been for some time in progress; the distinction drawn in early reigns between petty trespasses, which were left in the province of the sheriff, and grave offences, which alone were worthy of the king’s attention, was being slowly obliterated.[[631]] The royal courts steadily extended the sphere of their activity over all misdeeds, however trivial, until the whole realm of criminal law fell under the description of “pleas of the Crown.”
In the reign of John this process of expansion was far from complete: the words then, indeed, embraced grave criminal offences tried in the king’s courts, but not the numerous petty offences, which were still disposed of in the sheriffs tourn or elsewhere.[[632]]
North of the Tweed the same phrase has had a completely different history: in modern Scots law its connotation is still a narrow one; and this is a direct result of the slow growth of the Scottish Crown in authority and jurisdiction, in notable contrast to the rapidity with which the English Crown attained the zenith of its power. The kings of Scotland failed to crush their powerful and unruly vassals, and consequently the pleas of the Scottish Crown, exclusively reserved for the High Court of Justiciary, formed a meagre list—the four heinous crimes of murder, robbery, rape, and arson. The feudal courts of the Scottish nobles long preserved their wide jurisdiction over all other offences. When the heritable jurisdictions were at last abolished, in 1748, mainly as a consequence of the rebellion of three years previously, the old distinction, so deeply rooted in Scots law, still remained. The sheriff court had no cognizance, until late in the nineteenth century, over the four crimes specially reserved for the king’s judges.[[633]] Thus in Scotland the historic phrase “pleas of the Crown” is, even at the present day, confined to murder, robbery, rape, and fire-raising, while to an English lawyer it embraces the entire realm of criminal law.