ment of the Treasury was in almost
permanent session at Westminster, collecting the Crown's revenue
and enforcing the Crown's rights.

Appeals from these courts could be made to the king and/or his
small council, which was the curia regis and could hear any plea
of the land. In 1234, the justiciar as the principal royal
executive officers and chief presiding officer over the curia
regis ended. In 1268, a chief justiciar was appointed the hold
pleas before the king. Henceforth, a justiciar was a royal officer
who dealt only with judicial work. About the same time the
presiding justice of the court of common pleas also came to be
styled justiciar or chief justice. Justices were no longer
statesmen or politicians, but simply men learned in the law.

Membership in or attendance at the great council or parliament no
longer rested upon feudal tenure, but upon a writ of summons which
was, to a degree, dependent on the royal will.

Crown pleas included issues of the King's property, fines due to
him, murder (a body found with no witnesses to a killing),
homicide (a killing for which there were witnesses), rape,
wounding, mayhem, consorting, larceny, robbery, burglary, arson,
poaching, unjust imprisonment, selling cloth by nonstandard
widths, selling wine by nonstandard weights. Crown causes were
pled by the king's serjeants or servants at law, who were not
clerics. Apprentices at law learned pleading from them.

Between the proprietary action and the possessory assizes there is
growing use in the king's courts of writs of entry, by which a
tenant may be ordered to give up land, e.g. by a recent flaw in a
tenant's title, for a term which has expired, by a widow for her
late husband's land, or by an heir who has become of full age from
his guardian. For instance: " ...Command Tertius that ... he
render to Claimant, who is of full age, as it is said, ten acres
...which he claims to be his right and inheritance and into which
the said Tertius has no entry save by Secundus, to whom Primus
demised [gaged] them, who had only the wardship thereof while the
aforesaid Claimant was under age, as he says...". But most
litigation about land is still through the writ of right for
proprietary issues and the assizes of novel disseisin and mort
d'ancestor for possessory issues.

Royal itinerant justices traveled to the counties every seven
years. There, they gave interrogatories to local assizes of twelve
men to determine what had happe