the house of lords as a court of appeal cal common law recognized no right or need to go beyond the formally enrolled decisions of the king’s judges sitting in the king’s courts of record at Westminster Hall, who of course considered only issues of law, since matters of fact were determined by juries. Sir John Baker has noted that the “decision of a court such as King’s Bench or Common Pleas was a decision of the whole bench, not of the trial judge alone”, while “[j]udgments in the superior courts were intended to be final; there was no justification for appealing from the king [who appointed the judges] to anyone else.”4 And because the formal record was conclusive, medieval English judges were reluctant to enter judgments on the court’s rolls so long as any significant division or difference of opinion existed between them. In such circumstances they preferred to adjourn further proceedings until a consensus could be reached, something made easier by the relatively small size of the judicial bench. The three major common law courts – Common Pleas, King’s Bench and Exchequer – which convened in Westminster Hall were each staffed by between four and eight judges, promoted from the ranks of practising “apprentices”, serjeants-at-law and utter-barristers, until the seventeenth century, when the judicial establishment settled down to four per court. Informal discussions between judges and serjeants in the two Serjeants Inns where both lodged during term-time sittings of the courts could also facilitate an agreed resolution of tricky points of law.5 The common law did offer some limited means of redress to dissatisfied litigants. Writs of attaint and false judgment, tried by juries of 24, twice the normal size, could be brought against bribed or otherwise corrupted juries and judges, while manifest procedural anomaly was addressed by way of petition or writ of error.None of these procedures involved a full re-hearing or re-argument of the case in question. Rather, following a writ or petition presented by a litigant alleging some formal error “in the record, the process, or the rendering of judgment” and a sighting of the relevant court rolls, the reviewing court could either resolve the matter forthwith or order the original tribunal to do so. Until the mid4 Baker, John H. 2002 p. 135. 5 Ibid. p. 135; Sainty, John C. 1993 pp. 19, 57 and 103-104. 178
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