ABSTRACT
The oral complaints to the justices and their written equivalents, 'bills in eyre', represent a flooding into the royal courts of litigation from the shire courts, where the oral complaint was the normal way of bringing a suit. Seignorial justice - judicial power attributed to landlords as such - had been greatly reduced in significance by the resourcefulness of the courts of the supreme royal landlord. Though the Lord High Admiral was holding a court by 1357, the development of admiralty jurisdiction was held back by parliament’s inveterate suspicion of the conciliar courts. Many suits in the conciliar courts were in fact for possession of the written evidences - the chest of title deeds - on which ownership of the property rested. Paper pleading was not, however, an invention of the conciliar courts, nor an adoption by them of civilian methods, but something which developed naturally in all English courts in the later Middle Ages.
