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the sanctuary, as it were. A cloister, for example, might easily be arranged, or a new one erected, to receive them, or they might be admitted within the restored Chapter-house. Many of the detached statues, especially, might so be placed with great propriety and with good effect. Many of the larger compositions, which interfere fatally with the architecture of the church, cannot, it may be feared, be safely removed; but the floor or pavement of the church itself would thus be freed, in a great measure, from the inconvenient accumulation of works in all respects inappropriate both in character and in place.

III.

WESTMINSTER HALL.

BY EDWARD FOSS, F.S.A.

READ ON JULY 23, 1866.

As this will probably be the last occasion on which the Archæological Institute, as a body, will have an opportunity of visiting Westminster Hall while it continues the theatre in which our civil judicature is administered, a few short notices of the legal uses to which it has been hitherto applied may not be uninteresting to the members.

The original edifice (upon the architectural peculiarities of which I do not pretend to touch) can boast of an antiquity of between seven hundred and eight hundred years, having been erected in the reign of William II., as an appendage to the palace of Westminster. Besides the royal ceremonies and festivities, to which it was at first applied, we may naturally suppose, from its size and convenience, that it was also used as the place for discussing and deciding those great questions in which the Crown was concerned, and also the minor differences always arising between subject and subject. At that time, and for a long period afterwards, such questions were

tried before the "king himself," and the barons and prelates of the realm, in what was called the "Aula Regia," or "Curia Regis," a court which accompanied the king wherever he went, but which had its principal seat in the palace of Westminster. Henry II., a hundred years after, is said to have attended personally in his court, and to have made frequent progresses to discover the abuses in the rural jurisdictions.* In more recent times, also, we have some instances of our kings exercising this prerogative. After the lapse of three hundred years we have evidence that King Edward IV. sat three days together in the King's Bench, and was present at a trial for rape.† James I. is the last instance on record. That conceited monarch was not satisfied with sitting on the Bench to hear how justice was administered, but even claimed to exercise judicial power. On Sir Edward Coke calmly telling him that it was not competent for him to decide questions of law, he said that "he thought the law was founded on reason, and that he had reason as well as the judges." Whereupon Coke was obliged to represent to him, "that his Majesty was not learned in the law, which was the mete-wand and measure to try the causes of his subjects, and which protected his Majesty in safety and peace." The king on this was greatly irate, and exclaimed, "that then he should be under the law, which was treason to affirm." Whereupon Coke closed the amusing discussion by the

* Lord Lyttelton's Henry II. ii. 16.

† Stowe (Thoms' Ed.) 174; State Trials, iii. 942.

following quotation from Bracton: " Quod rex non debit esse sub homine, sed sub Deo et lege:

"

At the time of the Conquest, and long after, there were three special periods at which the kings held their courts, or, as it was called, "wore their crowns," with extraordinary solemnity, not only for the consideration of national affairs, but also for the transaction of legal business. These were at Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide; answering to our present law terms of Hilary, Easter, and Trinity ;-Michaelmas Term having been added at a subsequent period. It is a curious illustration of the antiquity of the Terms that at the Court held at Christmas, 1096, a judgment was pronounced against William, Earl of Eu, for a treasonable conspiracy, on the very day on which Hilary Term, according to the Constitutions of Edward the Confessor, confirmed by William the Conqueror, then began.†

There is no positive evidence of any of these trials taking place in Westminster Hall during the reign of its founder, William II., nor in those of his two successors; but in the records of the reigns of Henry II., Richard I., and John, the expressions "my Court at Westminster," and "my barons and justices," are of frequent occurrence.‡

A great change took place under the last-mentioned monarch. King John, when in England, was in the

12 Coke's Reports, 65.

† Madox's Exchequer, i. 8.

Manning's Serviens ad Legem, 171; Dugdale's Orig. Jurid. 49, 50, 92.

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