The justice which the gentry began to administer in late medieval
England as the king’s agents was recognizably a public criminal justice
separate from private vengeance. Prosecution of a wrongdoer’s offence
against the peace (the sectam pacis) was always distinguished from the
suit of the persons he injured: the king might pardon the first, but he
could not pardon the second.^254 On the other hand the feeling arose that
suit by the victims of crime for monetary compensation ought not to
bring down on criminals the harsher public punishments as well.
William de Prene, carpenter and royal master of works at Roscommon
in Ireland, complained in 1292 that he was held in prison on a charge
of stealing 60s.-worth of the king’s iron nails, an accusation of theft
which (he asserted) had been made neither by an appeal of felony nor
by the indictment of a presenting jury. The court of king’s bench there-
upon decided that the action, even though accepted by the Irish justices
as ‘for the state of the lord king, who has no peer within his lands and
whose convenience and rights ought to be protected and regarded by
everyone of his lieges’, should be regarded as having been brought
‘civilly, not criminally’, because ‘three hundred pounds were laid as
damages of the lord king and queen, and for this reason no one ought
to be adjudged to the ultimate penalty’.^255 Where there was a writ claim-
ing damages for wrong it obviously originated a civil action: complaints
of trespass to the justices of trailbaston and of the peace, who were
commissioned to maintain order by punishing malefactors and not
empowered to award damages, could be seen as a lesser category of
crime, later distinguished from the capital felonies by the name of
‘misdemeanour’.^256
An accusation of crime advanced in King’s Bench or before justices of
assize, trailbaston, or of the peace, whether a felony (such as murder,
rape, robbery, or arson) or what commissions called an ‘enormous
trespass’, became an indictment when it was found ‘a true bill’ by a
presenting jury and endorsed: ista billa est vera.^257 Criminal bills were
normally prosecuted for the king, but as a matter of public policy com-
plainants continued to be allowed or indeed encouraged in particular
cases to sue for the king and for themselves (tam pro domino rege quam
Law of injuries and public peace 245of the Peace for Lanarkshire 1707–1723, ed. C. A. Malcolm (Edinburgh: Scottish History
Society, 3rd ser. xvii, 1931); for the juges de paix, see I. Woloch, The New Regime:
Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820(New York, 1994), 307–12, 317–20,
350–1, 357.
(^254) N. D. Hurnard, The King’s Pardon for Homicide before AD 1307(Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1969), 16 ff.
(^255) Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench, ii. 127–34.
(^256) Proceedings before the Justices of the Peace in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,
ed. B. H. Putnam (London, 1938), pp. cliv–clviii.
(^257) Putnam, ibid., pp. c–cvi, 237 ff.