Читать книгу A Concise History of the Common Law - Theodore F. T. Plucknett - Страница 166

Numerous courts were founded upon the model of the Council. Many of them have faint beginnings in the reign of Henry VII or even earlier, but it is to Henry VIII and Elizabeth that they owe the bulk of their power. We have already mentioned the Council and the Star Chamber; there were many more besides. The Court of Requests first appears in 1483² and was modelled to some extent on the Chambre des Requêtes, a similar institution in France. The next we hear of it is in 1485 when a bill to abolish it was introduced into parliament and passed the commons, but got no further.³ Under Henry VII it was, in effect, a committee of the Council for the hearing of poor men’s causes and matters relating to the King’s servants. Sometimes it appears in two divisions, one in the White Hall at Westminster and the other travelling with the King. Its jurisdiction was mainly civil, although at times it entertained matters of a criminal character, such as grave disorder, forgery, etc., and for some time the court seems to have been genuinely popular. Its head was the Lord Privy Seal, and assisting him were a number of masters of requests, two of whom deserve to be remembered for their contributions to legal literature: Christopher St. Germain, and Sir Julius Caesar. Its organisation closely followed that of the Chancery. Its procedure was at first intended to be informal, but the abuses to which this led compelled the court to follow the Chancery system of having bills drawn and signed by counsel. In the end it passed from an extreme of informality to the opposite extreme of technicality when it had adopted the summary procedure of the civil law—which was far from summary according to modern ideas. No doubt the example of Chancery was influential here, as also in its claims to administer equity. Later in Elizabeth’s reign the presence of civilians in the Court of Requests led that court to exercise a wide Admiralty jurisdiction, including mercantile as well as maritime and prize jurisdiction.⁴