Definition
An archaic Law French term meaning "bench," used in medieval and early modern English legal texts to denote either of two principal royal courts: the court later called the Queen's Bench (or King's Bench), and the Court of Common Pleas. The phrase *de lun bancke et de lautre* — "of the one bench and of the other" — appears in early legal texts as a collective reference to both courts simultaneously.
The term is purely historical. No modern court uses this designation.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of "bank."
Historical common usage: In ordinary medieval and early modern English, "bank" and its variant forms referred to a raised shelf, counter, or bench — including the physical bench on which judges sat.
The legal term *bancke* derives directly from this physical sense: the judges' bench gave its name to the court itself. The gap between common and legal meaning is less a divergence than a narrowing — the legal usage preserved one specific institutional sense (the royal judicial bench) long after the common word moved toward financial and geographic meanings.
Common Confusion
Bancke should not be confused with the modern term "bank" in its financial sense, though both descend from the same root. Researchers encountering *bancke* or its variants (*banc*, *banco*, *bank*) in historical legal sources should read context carefully. The phrase *in banco* or *en banc* — still used in modern practice to describe a full-court sitting — is the direct descendant of this usage. See BANC; EN BANC.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English legal records — Year Books, plea rolls, early treatises, and abridgements — will encounter *bancke* and its variants as standard institutional vocabulary. The term appears without explanation in sources of that period because its meaning was assumed.
Two practical traps: First, variant spellings (*banc*, *banco*, *bancke*, *bank*) are used interchangeably across sources, and indexing in older collections is inconsistent. A search for one form may miss records using another. Second, the phrase *de lun bancke et de lautre* functions as a term of art designating both benches collectively — it is not a description of a single court. Misreading it as referring to one institution distorts the jurisdictional picture.
The connection to modern *en banc* practice is genuine but should not be overstated. Modern *en banc* refers to a full court sitting together, which is a related but distinct concept from the medieval institutional use of *bancke* as a court name.
Within the Law Mind corpus, *bancke* is primarily a finding aid for navigating early common law sources. Researchers tracing the jurisdictional separation between King's Bench and Common Pleas, or the history of either court's jurisdiction, will encounter this term as a marker of the period before those distinctions were fully hardened.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the sole historical dictionary source for this entry and handles the term economically: it supplies the Law French origin, identifies both courts to which the name applied, gives the illustrative phrase from Britton, and cross-references "Bank." This is adequate for the term's limited scope.
Burrill correctly notes that *bancke* was the predecessor designation for courts later styled Queen's Bench and Common Pleas — a useful reminder that institutional names changed over time and that the same underlying courts appear under different names depending on the period of the source. The entry's brevity reflects the term's status: it is a historical label, not a term with evolving doctrine attached to it.
What Burrill does not address — and what a researcher should know — is the relationship between *bancke* and the surviving phrase *en banc*. That connection is real, but the modern usage has drifted toward a procedural meaning (full-court sitting) rather than a court-name meaning.
Jurisdictional Note
*Bancke* is specific to the English common law tradition. It has no counterpart in civil law systems. American legal usage inherited the *en banc* form but not *bancke* as an institutional name; no American court has ever used this designation.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Courts of Common Law; King's Bench; Court of Common Pleas