COURT BARON (Lat. Curia Baronis). The domestic court of the lord of a manor. Such courts were incident to every manor, barony. or lordship of land, in the Anglo-Saxon period of English history, and in subsequent ages came to be regarded as the characteristic and essential quality of a manor, insomuch that Coke declares that "a court baron is the chief prop Ind pillar of a manor, which no sooner faileth, but the manor falleth to the ground." Being of customary origin, and custom being a mat ter of immemorial usage. no new courts baron, and consequently no new manors, can be created, and it is asserted by Blackstone that all manors existing in his time "must have existed as early as King Edward the First." However this may be, the manorial courts of which we have any knowledge are of gTeat antiquity, though those that remain have by successive acts of Parlia ment and social changes been reduced to mere shadows of their former authority and impor tance, most of them having to-day only a nomi nal existence.
The court baron was and is the court of the freeholders of the manor, as distinguished from the villeins and copyholders. The lord, or his steward, is the presiding officer of the court, which is composed of those freehold tenants of the manor who owe, as one of the services or incidents of their tenure, the service of 'suit,' or attendance, at the court. While the judicial functions of the court varied considerably, ac cording to the customs of the manor, in general it exercised an ordinary jurisdiction in civil suits among the tenants of the manor, deter mined proprietary rights to land, regulated rights of common, sanctioned grants of the waste, etc. Until the reform of legal pro
cedure in England in 1833, the great proprietary action for the recovery of land, known as the `writ of right,' was properly instituted in the court baron, though the great authority of the regular tribunals of the kingdom had long since brought safer and more convenient processes within the reach of persons asserting claims to land. Many of the manorial courts have died out from the lack of a competent number of `suitors,.' i.e. freemen subject to do suit at court.
A species of court baron existed in the manors created by royal patent in the Province of New York in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These were modeled after the historic courts baron of the mother country, and for a time en joyed considerable authority. They were abol ished with the manors to which they were in cident in the revolutionary legislation of 1787. Consult: Bolton, History of the Several .Towns, Manors, and -Patents of the County of West chester, New York; Digby. History of the Law of Real Property (5th ed., Oxford, 1898) ; Pollock and Maitland. History of English Law (2d ed., London, 1S99) ; Maitland, Select Pleas in Manorial Courts (Seidel: Society, 1889), In troduction: Gordon. History . . . of Court Baron and Court Leet (London, 1731). See COURT LEET ; CUSTOMARY LAW; MANOR.