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Court leet, plural Courts Leet, or Court Leets, an English criminal court for the punishment of small offenses. The use of the word leet, denoting a territorial and a jurisdictional area, spread throughout England in the 14th century, and the term court leet came to mean a court in which a private lord assumed, for his own profit, jurisdiction that had previously been exercised by the sheriff.
The court met twice a year under the presidency of the lord’s steward, who, by the end of the 13th century, was almost always a professional lawyer and acted as judge. The two main functions of the court were to hold view of frankpledge (the pledge of responsibility made by each freeman) and to receive notices of accusation of crimes made by the juries, constituted in the Assize of Clarendon in 1166. Because serious cases were increasingly reserved to itinerant justices, the rights of trial of small, local courts became restricted to petty misdemeanours only. The 17th-century jurist Sir Edward Coke held that a court leet could not imprison but could only fine or apply other pecuniary penalties, and as time went on its capacity to enforce its judgments became progressively weaker. After the 16th century the duties of the court leet were increasingly transferred to the justice of the peace.
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Frankpledge, system in medieval England under which all but the greatest men and their households were bound together by mutual responsibility to keep the peace. Frankpledge can be traced back to the laws of King Canute II the Great of Denmark and England (d. 1035), who declared that every man,…
Assize of Clarendon
Assize of Clarendon, (1166), a series of ordinances initiated by King Henry II of England in a convocation of lords at the royal hunting lodge of Clarendon. In an attempt to improve procedures in criminal law, it established the grand, or presenting, jury (consisting of 12 men in each hundred…
Sir Edward Coke
Sir Edward Coke, British jurist and politician whose defense of the supremacy of the common law against Stuart claims of royal prerogative had a profound influence on the development of English law and the English constitution.…