Shire court

“ He presided over the shire court. He received one-third of the fines from the profits of justice and collected as well a third of the revenues derived from tolls and duties levied in the boroughs of his shire. The office tended to be hereditary. Royal representatives called "reeves" started to assist them. The reeve took security from every person for the maintenance of the public peace. He also tracked cattle thieves, brought suspects to court, gave judgments according to the doom books, and delivered offenders to punishment.
Under the earls were the thegns. ”

“ These orders evidently caused some commotion in the shires, for on 9th April they were significantly modified; the King “by the advice of his faithful men” issued other letters whereby the sheriffs were bidden not to proclaim the royal liberties and customs ascertained by means of the inquest or to enforce their observance, “for the present,” and were assured that he “had no will to raise up, or cause to be observed in the realm, any evil customs”; these new letters also were to be read in full shire-court;202 and the date for the return of the inquest was postponed to 25th June. ”

“ A King's reeve presided over local criminal and peace and order issues [leet jurisdiction] at monthly meetings of the hundred court. However, summary procedure was followed when a criminal was caught in the act or seized after a hue and cry. Every free man over age 12 had to be in a hundred. The hundred was a division of the shire [county] . Usually, the shire reeve, or "sheriff", held each hundred court in turn. In the hundred court, representatives of the villages settled their disputes and answered for breaches of the peace. ”

“ Theze freeholders, were, by the nature of their estates, the pares curtis; they were the proper and sole judges of all causes triable at the county court, which included almost all civil actions, and they were denominated in Saxon, lahmen, lawmen. The county court, thus composed of all the freeholders in the shire, waz a tribunal of great consequence, and inferior only to the witena-gemote, or national assembly. The Latin riters called theze freemen pares curtis and sectatores, peers of court and suitors. ”

“ For the common jury any man is qualified and liable to serve who has £10 by the year in land or tenements of freehold, copyhold or customary tenure; or £20 on lands or tenement held by lease for twenty-one years or longer, or who being a householder is rated at £30 in the counties of London and Middlesex, or £20 in any other county. A special jury cannot be ordered in cases of treason or felony, and may be ordered in cases of misdemeanour only when the trial is in the king’s bench division of the High Court, or the civil side at assizes. ”

“ Yet unless he employs a solicitor or casts his cares on the overburdened chief clerk to the Registrar, I suppose that is what the State expects him to do.
The County Court as a tribunal for doing justice between poor disputants is an ill-equipped machine, and, without doubt, if these poorer cases were tried by the judge on strict legal lines, and if he merely listened to the plaintiff and heard such portions of his and his friends’ wandering narratives as came within the rules of evidence, the almost universal result would be to non-suit the plaintiff on the ground that he proved no case. ”

“ Side by side with the enforced idleness of many of the highly paid County Court judges, there is in the High Court, both on the Equity and the Common Law side, a growing accumulation of arrears. Many of these cases involve comparatively small sums, and they might very well be tried before a competent County Court judge. A litigant at the present time entering an action for £51 in the High Court will be subjected to a delay of at least twelve months; whereas if he sues for £49 in the County Court, even in a busy district, he may reasonably expect to have his case settled within a month. ”

“ It is the opinion of persons of experience that the result has undoubtedly been to drive to London much of the civil business which properly belongs to the provinces, and ought to be tried there, and thus at once to increase the burden on the judges and jurymen in London, and to increase the costs of the trial of the actions sent there. Some persons advocate the continuous sittings of the high court in certain centres, such as Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham and Bristol, or (in fact) a decentralization of the judicial system. ”

“ He said, in the House of Commons, on December 18, 1780, that he thought that the addition of a judge to each of the English Courts at Westminster would be sufficient for Wales, but his original plan was to abolish five out of the eight Welsh judgeships which existed, and to throw the counties into districts. His opposition to the Welsh judicature was on account of expense, and not upon general grounds. In 1798, a Select Committee of the House of Commons on finance in Courts of Justice recommended that the four Circuits in Wales should be amalgamated. ”

“ I may commend to anyone desirous of studying in further detail the arguments for and against the extension of County Courts, the proceedings of the Norwood Commission on County Courts in 1878. There is no doubt that if the business man had had his way the County Court in urban centres would have long ago been a district Court for all but cases of some peculiar public or legal importance. The great enemy to such an extension has always been the lawyer, and the London lawyer in particular. ”

“ Lord Chief Justice DE GREY, on that occasion said, 'When the House of Commons adjudged any thing to be a contempt, or a breach of privilege, their adjudication is a conviction, and their commitment in consequence is execution; and no Court can discharge, on bail, a person that is in execution by the judgment of any other Court. The House of Commons, therefore, having an authority to commit, and that commitment being an execution, what can this Court do? It can do nothing, when a person is in execution by the judgment of a Court having a competent jurisdiction. ”

“ Thus, no Court in the universe, which professed to be governed by principle, would, we presume, undertake to say, that the Courts of Great Britain, or of France, or of any other nation, had misunderstood their own statutes, and therefore erect itself into a tribunal which should correct such misunderstanding. We receive the construction given by the Courts of the nation as the true sense of the law, and feel ourselves no more at liberty to depart from that construction, than to depart from the words of the statute. ”

“ It is true, that the separation of common law from equity jurisdiction is peculiar to Great Britain; no other of the states of the old world having adopted it. But it is equally true, that in no other of the states of the old world did the trial by jury constitute a part of their jurisprudence, and every practical lawyer knows, that to give jurisdiction to a court of equity, or to distinguish a case of equity jurisdiction from one of common law, under the British practice, the averment is indispensable that the complainant is remediless at law. ”

“ It is not consistent with the spirit in which justice should be administered that it should be paid for by the litigants. This was the view expressed by the County Court Commissioners, but no effect has been given to their opinion. There is no reason in justice or expediency why the County Court, the poor man's court, should be supported by the suitors themselves while the High Court, the rich man's court, is mainly paid for by the State.
DISCUSSING THE CASE.
We have endeavoured to point out, in a temperate spirit, the chief defects of the present County Court system. ”

“ In its struggle for existence we find a warfare being carried on between the business man and the lawyer in which, foot by foot, the business man gains and places his pet tribunal in a more secure position whilst he takes breath for a new encounter. Still, although the building up of the County Court to its present story of usefulness has been the work in the main of business men, yet few realise that the County Court of to-day with its £100 jurisdiction is only a belated attainment of the ideals of Lord Brougham in 1830. ”

“ When we congratulate ourselves, as we are so apt to do, on the length of time the system of trial by jury has been established in England, and the safeguard it affords against attempts to strain the law to the prejudice of the accused, we are often unmindful of the fact that the institution has not always proved a safeguard when the court, acting under the influence of the Crown, endeavoured to obtain a conviction. ”

“ If an action involve no more than £100, a solicitor may seek the County Courts—for there are seven of such courts for the county of London. The advantage in so doing is chiefly in the smaller costs, which are a serious matter to all English litigants, and almost prohibitive to the poor. The judge of a county court must be a barrister of at least seven years standing and generally hails from London. ”

“ It is not a court of record, but may hold pleas of debt, or damages, under the value of forty shillings; over some of which causes these inferior courts have, by the express words of the statute of Gloucester, (6 Edward I., eh. 8,) a jurisdicton totally exclusive of the king's superior courts. * * The county court may also hold plea of many real actions, and of all personal actions to any amount, by virtue of a special writ, called a justicies, which is a writ empowering the sheriff, for the sake of despatch, to do the samee justice in his county court as might otherwise be had at Westminster. ”

“ The County Courts number about 500, not confined to London but dotted all over England, the districts of which are much smaller than counties, notwithstanding they are called County Courts. One judge suffices for a number of these courts which are grouped into circuits. In most courts the judge is allowed to decide both facts and law, but a jury of eight men can be had at the instance of either party. The jurisdiction is at present limited, in common law cases, to £100 and, in equity actions, to £500; while there is no jurisdiction whatever in the matters of divorce, libel or slander. ”

“ Because in that Court there is a crying abuse calling aloud for reform, namely, imprisonment for debt, which abuse, when abolished or mitigated, will release Judges from odious duties, and give them time for more honourable services. Because in great urban centres there has long been a demand for continued sittings, which the High Court has been unable to comply with, but which the County Court already satisfies to some extent, and with reasonable equipment could supply in full measure. The record of the County Courts in the last fifty years is a very remarkable one. ”

“ The jurors were not unfrequently interested: in some instances the prosecutor sat as witness and judge, giving the principal evidence in the case in which he was both to decide the guilt and apportion the punishment. [80]
The establishment of a court of criminal jurisdiction was alone authorised by the parliament: the necessity for supplemental laws was not foreseen, but was soon perceived. The governors assumed the legislative authority, under the disguise of orders and regulations, often contrary to the principles of English law, and sustained by penalties unknown in Great Britain. ”

“ In boroughs, an offending burgess may lose liberties or have to abjure their trade or craft. Pillory and tumbrel [e.g.ducking stool] was usual for bakers and alewives who broke the assizes of bread and beer, which was often.
The Royal Court had grown substantially and was not always presided over by the King. To avoid court agents from having too much discretionary power, there was a systematic procedure for bringing cases to the Royal Court. First, a plaintiff had to apply to the King's Chancery for a standardized writ into which the cause had to fit. ”

“ But when the Court of Common Pleas was severed from the Curia Regis, and became stationary at Westminster (a change which took place in the reign of King John, and was the subject of one of the provisions of Magna Charta) , it was found to be very inconvenient to be obliged to take juries there from all parts of the country. And as justices were already in the habit of making periodical circuits for the purpose of holding the assize in pleas of land, it was thought advisable to substitute them for the full court in banc at Westminster, in other cases also. The statute 13 Edw. I. c. ”

“ The high court, sitting in Edinburgh, has, in addition to its general jurisdiction, an exclusive jurisdiction for districts not within the jurisdiction of the circuits—the three Lothians, and Orkney and Shetland. The high court also takes up points of difficulty arising before the special courts, like the court for crown cases reserved in England. The court of justiciary has authority to try all crimes, unless when its jurisdiction has been excluded by special enactment of the legislature. ”

“ But as all suits relating to land, as well as some others, and all criminal indictments, could only be determined, so far as they depended upon oral evidence, by a jury of the county, it was necessary that justices of assize and gaol-delivery, being in general the judges of the courts at Westminster, should travel into each county, commonly twice a year, in order to try issues of fact, so called in distinction from issues of law, where the suitors, admitting all essential facts, disputed the rule applicable to them. ”