48 tury England. Notions of court reporting, however, are of little value without an understanding of the overall structure of the royal court systemat the time, and it is to this structure that I nowturn. Because of the centralized control of the royal courts, the systemof justice in England in the late eighteenth century had a superficial simplicity. In fact, the layers at which justice was administered were many. Patrick Colquhoun in his Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, published in 1796, gave a detailed statistical breakdown of the courts and their officials at work in the metropolitan area of London. In addition to the Old Bailey, he identified nine “supreme courts”, four ecclesiastical courts, seventeen courts for the City of London, eight courts for the City of Westminster, fourteen courts “in the part of the Metropolis, lying within the County of Middlesex”, and eight courts in the Borough of Southwark in Surrey.^ Functionally, other than the supreme courts and the ecclesiastical courts, these comprised eighteen inferior courts for small debts, one court of Oyer and Terminer and Gaol Delivery, four courts of general and quarter sessions of the peace, ten courts of petty sessions for the Police and five coroners’ courts. Together, they were serviced by 753 court officers.® Among the “supreme courts” were counted the Court of King’s Bench (Bancus Regis, B.R.); the Court of Common Pleas (Common Bench, C.B.) and the Court of the Exchequer. Four judges sat on each of these three courts, and together the twelve royal court judges, although comprising a small part of the total judicial system, superintended the litigation that gave form to the body of common lawto which the entire systemresponded. A fourth court of great prominence in the late eighteenth century was the Court of Chancery, presided over by the Lord Chancellor and the Master of the Rolls. These two judges heard and superintended matters of equity jurisprudence such as estates, trusts, allegations of fraud. The amount of business conducted by the Court of Chancery was vast, but the court was held in generally good repute in the year 1789. Abuses such as those depicted by Charles Dickens in his novel Bleak House had only partially materialized. The work of the Court of Chancery, however, did not fall under the expression “the common law of England”. The common law was shaped by the Court of King’s Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, and the Court of Exchequer. Originally, the jurisdiction of the Court of Exchequer was directed to handling disputes pertaining to royal finances; the jurisdiction of the Court of King’s Bench extended to the King’s direct personal interests; and the jurisdiction of the Court of Common Pleas covered the litigated quarrels of the population at large.’ Long before the eighteenth century, however, these demarca- ^ Colquhoun, P., A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, 5th ed., 1797, pp. 383-388. * Ibid. p. 389. ’ See Carter, A.T., A History ofEnglish Legal Institutions, 3rd ed., 1906, ch. XI (The Courts of Common Law).
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