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Indiana University Studies 
serted in the venire facias the words nisi prius (unless before) 
that day the justices appointed to take assizes shall come into 
his county. This is the origin of the expression that judges 
trying civil actions are “sitting at nisi prius ” . 
Edward III set up the tribunal of the justice of the peace. 
Long before there had been in every county certain men, con- 
sisting of the sheriffs, king’s constables, and bailiffs, and a 
few others, bound to preserve the peace. They had been 
called conservators of the peace. They could arrest disturbers 
and hold them in prison or bail them. Edward III added to 
the ex officio conservators men specially appointed by the 
crown. Their jurisdiction was soon extended. They were 
empowered to receive accusations and commit the accused 
awaiting the coming of the judges of the assize. Late in the 
reign of Edward III the keepers of the peace, now called 
justices of the peace, were empowered to take indictments and 
to bind people over to keep the peace, and to hear and deter- 
mine at the king’s suit all felonies and trespasses done in 
the county. From the very beginning of the office the Court 
of King’s Bench assumed appellate jurisdiction by means of 
certiorari and mandamus, altho the first mandamus in the 
books directed to justices of the peace was in the reign of 
Edward IV. An act of Edward IV wholly denuded the Sher- 
iff’s Tourn of criminal jurisdiction and gave it to the justices 
of the peace sitting in Quarter Sessions, and the reason given 
was the corruption of the sheriffs. 
In the time of Henry VII there was established another 
court known as the Star Chamber and for a time almost as 
important as the Court of Chancery. The Star Chamber was 
the “king in council”. It, like the Court of Chancery, was 
carved out of the residual jurisdiction still left in the Council 
after the formation of the common law courts, and exercised 
over criminal matters a power analogous to that exercised 
by chancery over civil. Because of the corrupt practices of 
the sheriffs, and because of the difficulty of obtaining verdicts 
against such men as the Percys and Fenwicks in Northumber- 
land, who kept armed desperate retainers in the courtroom, 
the Privy Council had been in the habit of interfering to pre- 
vent the perversion of justice; and finally in 1488 Henry VII 
procured the establishment of a regularly constituted court 
by an act of Parliament. The court was composed of the 
