I.: Pleas of the Crown.

Pleas were royal or common according as the interests of the Crown were or were not involved. This classification has already been discussed in connection with chapter 17. 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 royal business, whether relating to judicial 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 was reserved for criminal trials held before the King’s judges. This process of contraction had been nearly completed before the accession of John.

A tendency 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. The central courts extended their activity over all misdeeds, however trivial, until the whole realm of criminal law fell under the description of “pleas of the Crown.” In John’s reign this process of expansion was far from complete: the words then, indeed, embraced grave criminal offences tried in the King’s great courts, but not the petty offences disposed of in the sheriff’s tourn or elsewhere.

North of the Tweed the same phrase has had a different history: in modern Scots law its connotation is still a narrow one; and this is a 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 its zenith. The Kings of Scotland failed to crush their powerful vassals, and 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, 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. 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.