136
77/6' Green ßag.
even any verbal fiction of its being so will be the development of the King's courts, show ing how royal justice "became truly national, admitted. . . . One court might claim, down to modern and preserved the substantial good points of times, to represent the king's original per ancient Germanic polity, while it discarded sonal justice more directly than the superior the obsolete forms." The King's courts, says Sir Frederick, at courts of common law and even the Chan the outset of their career, came under a rule cellor. This was the Marshalsea, the special which we shall find to run through the whole court of the king's household weilcling archaic and limited jurisdiction over its mem of our legal history, and never to be neglect ed with impunity. It may be expressed thus: bers; it does not seem to have had anything extraordinary jurisdiction succeeds only by to do with the King's Council. Its more ob becoming ordinary. By this we mean not vious defects of jurisdiction were supple only that the judgment and remedies which mented by a new court, entitled "The Court were once matter of grace hav'e to become of the Lord the King, at the Palace of the matter of common right, but that right must King at Westminster," created by several letters patent of James I.. Charles I., and be done according to the fundamental ideas finally Charles II. These courts appear to of English justice of which we spoke in the have almost escaped professional criticism, first lecture. The Court of Chancery con partly because their jurisdiction was merely formed in good time, and prospered; the local, partly because their powers followed Court of Star Chamber, warped to political substantially the course of the common law. ends, resisted and perished, involving one or At any rate the final charter of Charles II. two harmless victims in its fall. . . . was not disputed; and the Marshalsea, more For the present purpose we need only to over, rested on the firm ground of prescrip bear in mind the broad fact that in the course tion. We learn, however, from the only of the thirteenth century we find the king's writer on the practice of these courts, that judicial court separated from the king's gen the Palace Court had quite superseded it by eral council for affairs of State, and further the beginning of the nineteenth century at divided into three branches of King's Bench, latest : the two courts purported to be opened together, but the Marshalsea did no business. Common Pleas or Common Bench, and Ex chequer. If we are to fix a point where the He that would know the true causes of the royal jurisdiction becomes ordinary and of fall of the Palace Court may find them set cornmon right, it would seem to be given by down as well in a very useful modern book of the issue of writs in set forms to any one of reference as by a layman whose name was the king's subjects who will pay the proper Thackeray in the Ballads of Policeman X, fee. The suitor who "purchases" a writ, as under the heading of "Jacob Homnium's Hoss: a Pallice Court chaunt." Like most the official phrase ran, must of course choose petty local courts the Palace Court became at his peril that writ which will avail him in a hotbed of abuses and, although error would his particular case. It is no business of the lie to the King's Bench, the remedy of a new court or its officers to see that he gets the trial was not available to correct a perverse right one. That is part of the fundamental verdict. Such verdicts were not uncommon. methods of the common law; the party can! for the juries were apparently drawn from have the law's help only by helping himself the small tradesmen class, and invariably first. On these terms, and not otherwise, found for a tradesman plaintiff whatever the it is open to all. But if we must have a date evidence and the law might be. The court to remember, we still cannot find a better was abolished in 1849, and therewith, it than that of Magna Charta, for the text of the would seem, the last relic of the only royal charter shows clearly that the king's justice; jurisdiction which had never passed through is no longer a matter of favor, and that not the hands of the Council.
