Law Courts 179
reign that the Exchequer was distinctly a common-law
court; it was slow to lose its higher, essentially equitable,
jurisdiction. The Common Pleas was much more the
creation of a definite time and ordinance and bore marks
of inferiority to the other two.z
To begin with each had its proper business; the King's
Bench, the pleas of the crown, including all breaches of the
king's peace; the Common Pleas, the ordinary civil actions;
the Exchequer, matters touching the royal revenue. This
is but a rough statement; really the spheres of the King's
Bench and Common Pleas overlapped, and this facilitated
the practice of stealing work from the Common Pleas which
was begun by the King's Bench and adopted by the Ex-
chequer, for more business meant more money. In the end
it came about that while each court had some work all its
own, each could entertain any of the common civil actions.2
2. The Displacement of the Old Local Courts by a
New Local System of Royal Courts.—The immediate ef-
fects of the Norman Conquest upon the old local courts,
_ * For a useful diagram illustrating these and other developments of the
king's court, see G. B. Adams, The Descendants of the Curia Regis, Amer-
ican Historical Review, xiii, 11-15. But see also his The Origin of the
English Courts of Common Law, Yale Law Journal, xxx., 798-813.
2 Maitland, Justice and Police, p. 35. The differentiation of the King's
Bench from what might, at the end of the thirteenth century, be termed
the king's council (see below, pp. 296, 297, and note i) was very gradual.
"For ordinary purposes" the King's Bench consisted "of a few pro-
fessional judges, . . . but at any moment this court can be afforced
by the presence of the king, of his councillors, of numerous barons and
prelates"; in either form this was the old coram rege court. But in the
reign of Edward I., can be noted the beginning of the final complete separa-
tion of the King's Bench, a limited court of professional judges, from a
larger and vaguer king's court or what stood for that at this later date.
But when that separation had taken place and the old court had brought
forth its third judicial offspring, we find that neither in its smaller nor its
larger form, neither as Council nor as House of Lords, had that body
divested itself of all its judicial power. And the judicial power which
remained was of a higher order than that which it had transmitted. "A
court which is to stand above the king's bench is being evolved out of the
old court held coram rege."—Maitland, Introduction to Memoranda de
Parliament, pp. bnoL-lxxxi., passim. See also below, pp. 208, 209. The
passing of the chief justiciar, 1268, (ibid., p. 216, note 3) marked progress
in the separation of judiciary and executive. Prom that time each of
the central, common-law courts had its Chief Justice—in the case of the
Exchequer known as Chief Baron.