Читать книгу A Concise History of the Common Law - Theodore F. T. Plucknett - Страница 128

Before we discuss further the character and development of the King’s Court (which historians usually refer to by its old Latin style of the Curia Regis) it may be well to examine the various meanings of the word “court” or “curia”. The original sense of the word is the rectangular open space around which the mediaeval house was built; the usual plan was that of a hollow square of buildings, the inside space of which was called the court. The colleges at Oxford and Cambridge are all built upon this plan, which was originally that of the ordinary dwelling-house, and in Cambridge their interior spaces are still called courts. The next development is to extend the word “court” to the house itself, and many famous houses in England are still called courts—Hampton Court, for example. Then the word “court” can also be used of the household and personal attendants of a king or great noble. Upon certain festivals during the year kings and nobles were accustomed to gather around them a particularly large company, and this event, too, becomes known as a court; the word will serve furthermore to designate the persons who were present on such an occasion. At Christmas and Easter the Anglo-Norman kings held courts of this character. The word was also applied to those assemblies at which attendance was compulsory as a feudal duty, and thence by a natural transition to any assembly for the purpose of transacting important public business; the Bank of England is governed by a court, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts by a General Court. Finally, the word “court” is particularly used of such assemblies when they are engaged in judicial business. In mediaeval usage the word “court” may bear any of these different meanings singly or in combination, and if mediaeval institutions are to be understood properly it must be remembered that a court might be at the same time legislative, judicial, deliberative, and even festive.

It was all the more easy to combine these different functions in one body because early courts were very different from modern ones. The central figure of a court to-day is the judge, but, as we shall see later,¹ it required some time before English law developed this office. Feudal courts seem generally to have consisted not of judges but of a number of “suitors” with whom rested the decision. The lord of the court indeed presided in person or more usually by his steward, but the president was in no sense a judge as the word is understood to-day. Under the Norman kings, we have descriptions of trials where it plainly appears that the king himself demanded of his barons in the court to pronounce a judgment.² His lords, as we have seen, had courts of their own. Like the royal courts, these seignorial courts could sometimes take a political appearance, and from time to time we find lords holding assemblies of tenants like little parliaments in order to obtain grants of money.³ The House of Lords when sitting as a criminal court preserved, at least in theory, this old conception of a court of many suitors who are judges, irrespective of their being professional lawyers, and exactly reproduced an old feudal court of barons who are judges, while the presiding officer (the steward of the lord—in this case the King’s Lord High Steward) is merely chairman.⁴