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CURIA REGIS, or ''Aula Regis'', is a term for the King's Court or Council used in England from the time of the Norman Conquest to about the end of the 13th century, to describe a council and a court of justice, the composition and functions of which varied considerably from time to time. It is important and interesting because it is the germ from which Parliament, the higher courts of law, and the Privy Council and Cabinet have sprung. Of these, the legislature is formally the High Court of Parliament; H.M. Judges sit in the Supreme Court of Judicature; and only the executive government is no longer conducted in a royal Court. It was, at first, the general council of the King, or the ''commune concilium'', i.e. the feudal assembly of the tenants-in-chief, which was to evolve into the House of Lords; but it assumed a more definite character during the reign of Henry I, when its members, fewer in number, were the officials of the royal household and other friends and attendants of the king. It was thus practically a committee of the larger Council, and assisted the King in his judicial work, its authority being as undefined as his own. About the same time the curia undertook financial duties, and in this way was the parent of the Court of Exchequer (curia regis ad scaccarium). The members were called justices, and in the King's absence the Chief Justiciar presided over the court. In 1178, Henry II appointed five members of the curia to form a special court of justice, who, unlike the other members of the curia, were not to follow the King's court from place to place, but were to remain in one place. Thus the Court Of King's Bench (curia regis de banco) was founded; and the foundation of the Court Of Common Pleas was provided for in one of the articles of Magna Carta . The Court Of Chancery was also an offshoot of the Curia Regis. About the time of Edward I. the executive and advising duties of the curia regis were discharged by the king's secret council, the later Privy Council, which is thus connected with the Curia Regis; and from the Privy Council has sprung the Cabinet. In his work ''Tractatus de legibus Angliae'', Ranulf de Glanvill treats of the procedure of the curia regis as a court of law. See W. Stubbs, Constitutional History, vol. i. (Oxford, 1883); R. Gneist, Englische Verfassungsgeschichte, English translation by P. A. Ashworth (London, 1891); A. V. Dicey, The Privy Council (London, 1887). |