V.: Common Pleas and the Exchequer.

Records speak of the curia regis meeting for legal business ad scaccarium (that is, in the room where the business of the Exchequer of Accounts was normally transacted) long before the genesis of a separate Court of Exchequer.

Formal sessions of the Exchequer for auditing the Sheriffs’ accounts could only be held at Westminster, where the necessary apparatus was kept; but “the Exchequer,” using that elastic word in a somewhat different sense, with much of its impedimenta of writs and tallies, would accompany the King on his progresses through the realm. In 1210, for example, the Exchequer was at Northampton; in 1266, at St. Paul’s; in 1277, at Shrewsbury; and in 1299, at York.

Now, the Exchequer, when it sat as a Court of law, was ever willing—for a consideration—to place its potent procedure, devised for the King’s use, at the disposal of private creditors, treating “common pleas” as “exchequer pleas.” Ordinary debtors, summoned to answer for their debts before the barones scaccarii were subjected to more rapid pressure than they would have experienced elsewhere. Debtors were thus as anxious to escape the jurisdiction of the Exchequer, as creditors were to invite it.

Both before and after Magna Carta, it would appear that common pleas were sometimes tried at sessions of the Exchequer, held not only at Westminster but also during its wanderings in the King’s train. It was natural enough that defendants who found themselves hustled by the stringent Exchequer process should seek shelter under the present chapter of the Great Charter. That they did so is proved by the words of the Articuli super Cartas of 1300, which declared that no common pleas should henceforth be held in the Exchequer “contrary to the form of the Great Charter.”

The implication of this clause of the statute of 1300 has sometimes been accepted literally. Magna Carta, however, in set terms at least, contains no such prohibition. If the present chapter excludes common pleas from the jurisdiction of a travelling Exchequer equally as from that of a travelling King’s bench, its words cannot be so stretched as to apply to normal sessions of the Exchequer held at Westminster. The Articuli super Cartas, however, attempted what the Charter of 1215 did not. After 1300 it was clearly illegal to hold any pleas in the Exchequer, unless such as affected the Crown and its ministers. Subsequent statutes confirmed this; but their plain intention was always defeated by the ingenious use of legal fictions and the connivance of the barons of Exchequer, who welcomed the increase of fees that kept pace with the increase of business.