The evident intention of this provision was to prevent irregularities at the critical stage of a trial, when the lex appointed by the court was attempted. This word lex, in its technical sense, may be correctly applied to any form of judicial test, such as compurgation, ordeal, or combat, the precise meaning required in each particular case being determined by the context.[[783]] In this passage of Magna Carta, it may be used in its widest connotation, but reasons will be immediately adduced for the belief that ordeal was specially present to the minds of those who framed it. Bailiffs, (the word is a wide one, including certainly the sheriffs and their underlings, and possibly also the stewards who presided in manorial courts)[[784]] had evidently been guilty of irregularities which public opinion of the day condemned. So much is clear: but authorities differ widely as to the exact nature of the abuse which is here prohibited.
I. Probable Object of the Chapter. The key is supplied by the words of article 4 of the Assize of Clarendon, the provisions of which still regulated the Crown’s practice in criminal cases in the reign of John. That ordinance explains the procedure to be followed when robbers, murderers, or thieves, apprehended by the sheriffs upon indictment, were brought before the justices for trial: “and the sheriffs shall bring them before the justices; and with them they shall bring two lawful men of the hundred and of the village where they were apprehended, to bear the record of the county and of the hundred, as to why they had been apprehended; and, there, before the justices they shall make their law.” This “law” is elsewhere in the ordinance clearly identified with ordeal;[[785]] and the purport of the whole was that accused men could not be put to ordeal except in presence of two lawful men who had been present at the indictment and had come before the justices specially to bear witness thereof. In other words, the sheriff’s verbal report of the indictment “sine testibus fidelibus ad hoc inductis” was not sufficient. The “county” and the “hundred” which had accused the prisoner must send representatives to bear record of the facts.[[786]]
The ordeal indeed was a solemn affair for which careful rules had been laid down. Every precaution was taken against the sheriff abusing his authority. His account of the indictment was checked by the presence of subordinate officials as well as of these members of the accusing jury. Moreover, lords of feudal courts, claiming this franchise, could only exercise it under royal warrant. Henry, the inventor of the system, sternly repressed all irregularities whether those of his own bailiffs or of the stewards of private lords.[[787]]
The same rules of procedure prevailed under John, who was less careful, however, than his father had been, to suppress irregularities. In Magna Carta he promised amendment. The presence of witnesses required by the Assize of Clarendon was once more insisted on as a check upon the capricious or unfair use of the ordeal. The Charter of 1216 repeated this provision without alteration. In 1217, however, a change occurred, which was undoubtedly a consequence of the virtual abolition of the ordeal by the Lateran Council in 1215. The framers of Henry’s second reissue, no longer so engrossed in pressing matters of state as they had been in the previous year, found leisure to adjust points of administrative detail. The simple reference to ordeal was inappropriate now that new forms of trial were taking its place. The justices, indeed, scarcely knew what test they should appoint, when ordeal had been forbidden. They seem sometimes to have resorted to compurgation and sometimes to battle; but the sworn verdict of neighbours was fast occupying the ground left vacant. The new Charter then made it clear that the provisions applied in 1215 to ordeal were to be extended to the other tests which were now being substituted for it. The “ad legem” of John’s Charter became in the new version “ad legem manifestam nec ad juramentum,” which might very well include battle and the decisions of jurors, as well as ordeal.[[788]]
II. Medieval Interpretations of the Passage. Ignorance of the exact nature of the abuse prohibited may well be excused at the present day, since it had become obscure within a century of the granting of the Charter. Some legal notes of the early fourteenth century, containing three alternative suggestions, have come down to us.[[789]]
(1) The first interpretation discussed, and apparently dismissed, in these notes, was that Magna Carta by this prohibition wished to ensure that no one should serve on a jury (in juratam) unless he had been warned by a timely summons. This far-fetched suggestion is clearly erroneous.
(2) The next hypothesis raised is that the clause prevented the defendant on a writ of debt (or any similar writ) from winning his case by his unsupported oath, where compurgators ought to have sworn along with him. Exception was, in this view, taken to the bailiff treating favoured defendants in civil pleas with unfair leniency.
(3) A third opinion is stated and eulogized as a better one, namely that the Charter prohibited bailiffs from showing undue favour to plaintiffs in civil pleas. The defendant on a writ of debt (or the like) should not, in this interpretation of Magna Carta, be compelled to go to proof at all (that is, to make his “law”) unless the plaintiff had brought “suit” against him (that is, had raised a presumption that the claim was good, by production of preliminary witnesses or by some recognized equivalent).[[790]] This last of the three interpretations thus suggested in the reign of Edward II. has its modern adherents, as will immediately be shown; but the discussion inaugurated in Plantagenet days has not yet received an authoritative settlement. It was discussed in the Court of Common Pleas so recently as 1700,[[791]] and historians at the present day differ as widely as do the lawyers.
III. Modern Interpretations of the Passage. No two of the recent authorities hold precisely similar opinions. Four views, at least, may be distinguished. (1) The provision is sometimes regarded as an attempt to prevent plaintiffs in civil suits from being treated with undue favour to the prejudice of defendants. A “suit” of witnesses (sectatores) had to be produced in court by the plaintiff before any “trial” (lex) could take place at all. Bailiffs were forbidden to allow, through slackness, favour, or bribery, this rule to be relaxed. This interpretation, which was adopted by the author of the Mirror of Justices, and by the writer of the notes appended to the Year Book already cited, found favour with Chief Justice Holt in 1700.[[792]]
(2) A second theory treats the clause as forbidding bailiffs (whether royal officers or manorial stewards) to use their authority to forward suits to which they happened to be parties. In certain circumstances, it would seem, the steward who presided as his master’s representative over the manorial court claimed the right to put a defendant to his proof, without first producing “suit” or its equivalent, a privilege, however, which he could exercise only once in every year. Royal bailiffs claimed this privilege, and that without any similar restrictions. One object of Magna Carta, in this view, was to reduce bailiffs to an equality with other litigants. No longer should their bare assertion enable them to dispense with the formalities which the court required from ordinary plaintiffs before putting their adversaries to the risk of “a law” or proof.[[793]]