Lichfield, instructing his chancellor and justices to employ ‘all the ways
and means by which one can trouble the said bishop by the law and
custom of our realm’, especially by getting commissions of oyer and
terminer sued out against him.^133
The king and council tried to curb lawlessness by mounting general
oyer and terminer commissions. From 1259 onwards the itinerant
justices were given power ‘to hear and determine complaints of
trespasses’, but the general eyre which had carried the burden of judi-
cial administration in the counties since the 1160s was unequal to the
new challenge. When Edward tried to conquer Scotland in the 1290s
and diverted some of his justices to its administration, the eyre ground
to a halt. There were to be one or two further eyres in London and Kent,
with their rolls of ‘pleas by plaints and bills’ (placita de querelis et
bilettis) or de querelis et transgressionibus (35 membranes in the
London eyre roll of 1321, to the same number of ‘pleas by writs’).^134 In
the rest of the country, however, bill jurisdiction passed to justices of
trailbaston, the court of King’s bench, and justices of the peace. The
commission of trailbaston, first issued under an ordinance of the Lent
parliament of 1305, looks as if it was devised to take over the bill juris-
diction of the eyre, expanded by concern for the evils caused by the
demands of the Scottish war. Bills came into king’s bench because the
court was used as a makeshift eyre in the early fourteenth-century crisis
of order. In 1305 the justices coram regewere used as justices of trail-
baston and assize in the home counties: in Kent they dealt with 21
membranes-worth of civil pleas and 15 membranes-worth of trespasses
by peticionibus et querelisor querelis et bilettis. In 1323 the court was
given a permanent trailbaston commission throughout England, and by
1336 it had a separate division to cope with bills.^135
The influence of bills in creating ‘a co-ordinated judicial and consti-
tutional whole’ (J. E. A. Jolliffe’s words) went further.^136 The bills of the
mass of people complaining of trespasses against the peace were
naturally submitted to the ‘keepers of the peace’. In the later thirteenth
century these custodes paciswere appointed only occasionally, two per
county, for policing purposes in times of emergency. In the fourteenth
184 New High Courts and Reform of the Regime
(^133) Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England, 86–92; R.W. Kaeuper, ‘Law and Order
in Fourteenth-Century England: The Evidence of Special Commissions of Oyer and Terminer’,
Speculum, 54 (1979); Records of the Trial of Walter Langeton, 1307–1310,ed. A. Beard-
wood, Camden Soc. 4th ser. 6 (London, 1969); Sayles, Functions of the Medieval Parliament,
339–41.
(^134) Jacob, Studies in the Period of Baronial Reform and Rebellion, 70; Harding, ‘Plaints and
Bills’, 76–7, 82.
(^135) ‘Early trailbaston proceedings from the Lincoln roll of 1305’, ed. A. Harding in
Medieval Legal Records edited in memory of C. A. F. Meekings, general editors R. F. Hunnisett
and J. B. Post (London: HMSO, 1978).
(^136) Jolliffe, ‘Some Factors in the Beginnings of Parliament’, 137.