Definition
A Latin term from old English law meaning a bench, high seat, or seat of judgment — specifically, a tribunal constituted for the administration of justice. The term carries two related but distinct senses in legal usage:
1. The physical or institutional seat of a court. In this sense, bancus denotes the bench itself, or the court as a formal body sitting in its full judicial authority. The English Court of Common Pleas was originally known simply as Bancus, later distinguished as Bancus apud Westmonasterium (the Bench at Westminster) and eventually styled Communis Bancus (the Common Bench).
2. A sitting in banc. Bancus describes a court convening with its full complement of judges exercising complete judicial authority, as opposed to a single judge sitting at nisi prius or in chambers. This sense survives in the modern phrase en banc.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
BANCUS REGIS — The King's Bench; styled the highest court in England after Parliament. The designation reflects the legal fiction that its proceedings were held coram ipso rege — before the king himself. When the sovereign was a queen, the court was correspondingly styled Bancus Reginae, the Queen's Bench.
BANCUS COMMUNIS (COMMUNIS BANCUS) — The Common Bench; the Court of Common Pleas. Distinguished from Bancus Regis in that it heard civil matters between subject and subject, rather than pleas of the Crown.
BANCUS APUD WESTMONASTERIUM — The Bench at Westminster; an intermediate descriptive name for the Common Pleas during the period when the court's physical location at Westminster became a defining characteristic.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering bancus in historical English sources — plea rolls, year books, Fleta, Bracton, and related materials — must determine which court the term actually designates in context. Early usage is not precise: bancus alone may refer to the Common Pleas, the King's Bench, or simply the concept of a court sitting in full form. The qualifying adjective is what distinguishes them, and those qualifiers are frequently absent or abbreviated in manuscript sources.
The evolution of naming matters for tracing jurisdiction. The Court of Common Pleas and the Court of King's Bench had overlapping but distinct subject-matter jurisdictions, and the fictions each court employed to poach the other's business are a recurring feature of English legal history. A plea roll headed with a bancus designation — without a clear regis or communis qualifier — may require external dating or contextual analysis to assign to the correct court.
For Law Mind corpus users: materials drawing on Fleta (cited uniformly across source dictionaries as lib. 2, c. 16, § 1) and related treatises will use bancus as a technical institutional term, not merely a physical description. The Second Edition of Black's specifically notes the sitting-in-banc sense, which connects bancus to the modern procedural concept of en banc review — a connection worth following when researching appellate procedure historically. Burrill's is the most useful source for the terminological evolution of the Common Pleas naming sequence.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four source dictionaries agree on the core definition: a bench or seat of judgment, with the Court of Common Pleas as the primary institutional referent. The agreement extends to the Fleta citation, which all editions reproduce consistently.
Points of divergence are instructive. Rapalje & Lawrence gives the fullest treatment of Bancus Regis, describing it as the highest court after Parliament and explaining the coram ipso rege rationale — material the other dictionaries either omit or subordinate. Burrill's is most attentive to the naming evolution of the Common Pleas (Bancus → Bancus apud Westmonasterium → Communis Bancus), making it the best starting point for historical tracing of that court's institutional identity. Black's Second Edition uniquely flags the sitting-in-banc sense, connecting the historical term to its surviving procedural descendant; the First Edition does not develop this link.
None of the source dictionaries address the fictions by which King's Bench and Common Pleas encroached on each other's jurisdiction — a significant omission for researchers working on jurisdictional history, who will need to supplement with treatise literature.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Courts of Common Law (English); En Banc; King's Bench