ABSTRACT
Felony remains a foundational concept in Anglo-American law, despite the intervention of many conceptual changes beginning already in the later middle Ages when crime was divided into felony and misdemeanor. A felony accusation thus served as an entry ticket to the royal courts. Felony could be seen as a way to assert a royal monopoly where treason was a notion involving a much wider range of lords. The key divergence came in the decade between the two great assizes of 1166 and 1176, whose combined effect amounted to a royal assumption of dominance over social control in England through a system of regular public prosecution. Public prosecution by indictment illustrates the shift itself and the new sense of crime required by the borrowed Roman differentiation of from civil wrongs. The general notion long predated the thirteenth century classification that reserved crimes, in principle, for the royal courts.
