CURIA REGIS (Lat.), or KING'S COURT. The ancient supreme court of England, known also as the .lula Regia, or Royal Hall (of Jus tice). It was instituted by William the Con queror as the instrument of his judicial au thority as supreme head of the State, and, exer cising, as it did, a general and practically un limited jurisdiction, it rapidly drew to itself all the important litigation of the kingdom. There had been no analorous tribunal under the Saxon kings, the popular county courts being in all ordinary eases supreme within their respec tive counties (shires), and a centralized adminis tration of justice being foreign to the senti ments and traditions of the English people.
Among the Normans, IDDA ever, it was the duke or king, and not the people, from whom the stream of justice flowed, and the followers of the Con queror could hardly be expected to subject their causes—their land-titles, their exactions, their controversies O•er tithes and preferments—to the judgment of the popular tribunals. It was in the County Court of the County of Kent, how ever, that a great case, involving the title to twenty-five manors, between the Archbishop of (2anterbury and ()do, the Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent, the half-brother of the King, was tried and adjudged in the tenth year of the Conqueror, and eases of this kind were not un common in the earlier years of William's reign.
But the older tribunals could not long compete with the immediate jurisdiction of the King, at first administered by him in person, and then by the chief justiciar, an officer of alunist royal authority and importance. All important causes, public and private, whether civil, criminal, or ecclesiastical, might be brought. before the King's court in the first instance, and judgments of the county courts and other local tribunals were sub ject to be appealed and brought before it for review. Its disinterestedness contributed as much as its authority to invest it with the function of the principal court in the kingdom for the adjudication of private controversies, and the position of the justiciar, as the chief execu tive and military officer, as well as the highest judicial officer in the kingdom, added to the weight of its judgments.
The Curia Regis early became a peripatetic or circuit court, attending the King, or, in his absence from the realm, the justiciar, in his fre quent progresses through the kingdom, and this, in the course of time, became a great abuse, amounting in many eases to a denial of justice.
To remedy this, it was provided in Magna Charta (Sec. 17) that common pleas—that is, causes between private parties—should not follow the court, but be heard in a fixed place. The establishment, thereupon, of a distinct C'ourt of Common Pleas, in the reign of Henry to sit permanently at Westminster, was the beginning of the dissolution of the Curia Regis. A separate division of the court, known as the King's Court of the Exchequer, had previously been created for determining questions relating to the royal exchequer. When in the same reign a Chancellor of the Exchequer was appointed as the permanent head of this department, it also became a sepa rate and distinct tribunal. Finally, in the fifty second year of Henry M., a third court, thence forth known as the Court of King's Bench, was created and took over the remaining jurisdiction of the Curia Regis. Thus, the latter, though never formally abolished, lost its importance and became obsolete, after two hundred years of greatness. The last justiciar of the King's Court, Robert de Brus, became the first Chief Justice of the King's Beneh in 120S. and with him the line of great justiciars became extinct. From that time to the reform of the judicial system of Great Britain in England lacked a single supreme court, but the model of the Curia Regis of the Norman kings was fol lowed in the creation of the Supreme Court of Judicature, by which justice is adthinistered in England to-day. See Court.; SUPREME Consult: Thorpe, The Jneirnt Tams and In stitutes of England (London, 18d0) ; Stubbs, Constitutional history of England (Oxford, 1883) ; Stephens, History of the Criminal Law (London, 1883) ; Essays in Anglo-Saxon. Law (Boston, 1876) ; Dugdale, Origines Juridieales; w, Historical Memorials of the English Laws, etc. (London, 16(16) ; Inde•wick, The King's Peace, J historical Sketch of English Law Courts (London, 1895) ; Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law (2d ed., London and Bos ton, 1889) ; Digby, An Introduction to the His tory of the Law of Real Property (5th ed., Ox ford, 1899).