III.: Influences of Magna Carta on genesis of Courts of Common Law.

The ultimate consequences of this reform reached further than was foreseen. Intended to remove a practical grievance, it had important effects on the development of the English Constitution. By securing for common pleas a permanent home, it gave an impetus to the disintegrating tendencies already at work within the many–sided household of the King. It helped forward the cleavage destined to divide completely the future Courts of Westminster from the Court of St. James’s and from Downing Street. Nor was this all: the special treatment accorded to “common pleas” emphasized the distinction between them and royal pleas, and so contributed to the splitting up of the same Curia Regis, on its judicial side, into two distinct tribunals. One little group of judges were set apart for hearing common pleas, and known as “the King’s Judges of the Bench,” or more briefly as “the Bench,” and at a later date as the Court of Common Pleas. A second group, reserved for royal pleas, became the court Coram Rege, known subsequently as the Court of King’s Bench. There were thus two benches: a common bench for common pleas and a royal bench for pleas of the Crown.

The double process, by which these two small courts separated slowly from the parent court and from each other, began long prior to Magna Carta, and was not completed before the close of the thirteenth century. These benches were also closely linked with a third bench, known for centuries as the Court of Exchequer, which was in its origin merely one department of that government bureau, the King’s financial Exchequer in which money was weighed and tested and the royal accounts drawn up. Many disputes or pleas affecting Crown debts had to be there decided, and a group of officials were set aside to try these. These men, called “barons of the exchequer,” formed what was in fact, though not in name, a third bench or court of justice.

All three of the Courts of Common Law were thus offshoots of the King’s household. In theory, each of these ought to have confined itself to a special class of suits—royal pleas, common pleas, and exchequer pleas respectively; but, by a process known to law–courts in all ages, each encroached on the jurisdictions and fees appropriate to the others, until they became, for most purposes, three sister courts of co–ordinate authority. They were bound to decide all suits according to the technical and inflexible rules of common law; and their jurisdiction required a supplement, which was supplied by the genesis of the Court of Chancery, dispensing, not common law, but equity, which professed to give (and, for a short time, actually did give) redress on the merits of each case as it arose, unrestrained by precedents and legal subtleties.