The Trial of Peers in Great Britain

Abstract

THE British House of Lords at present is a final appellate court.1 Until I948 it also had sole original jurisdiction over peers2 and peeresses' charged with treason, felony, or misprision thereof, with the exception of Irish peers in the House of Commons.4 This jurisdiction, while including persons unable to sit in the House of Lords,' applied to all its members with the exception of the bishops. The origin of the jurisdiction was in the relationships of political feudalism, whereby vassals owed suit of court to their lord and were triable only by their co-suitors.6 The absence of political feudalism in Anglo-Saxon England precluded the existence of the procedure there, where the witan tried great offenders only when they had flouted the concurrent jurisdictions of shire and hundred court.7 In the rather minute legal descriptions of classes before io66 significantly lacking is a group triable only by the witan, an omission in great contrast to the precise term in contemporary eleventh century Normandy of pares curiae,8 denoting men triable only by co-suitors of the same lord. This procedure was part of the political feudalism introduced into England by the Normans, whose presence in England after the Con-