Definition
An archaic and variant designation for the Court of Common Pleas, the English common law court with jurisdiction over civil disputes between private parties. The form "common place" (two words) appears in older legal manuscripts and printed texts as an abbreviated or colloquial reference to that court, used interchangeably with "common pleas" in the period literature. It carries no independent legal meaning beyond serving as an alternative label for that institution.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An obsolete spelling of "commonplace," meaning something ordinary or unremarkable.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Commonplace" (typically rendered as one word or hyphenated by this period) referred to something trite, ordinary, or to a memorandum or notebook entry — a "commonplace book" being a personal collection of notable passages.
The gap here is primarily orthographic and temporal rather than conceptual. A researcher encountering "common place" in a historical legal document should not read it as an adjective meaning ordinary or unremarkable, nor as a reference to a shared physical location. In legal sources, the two-word form is a court name — an abbreviation of "Court of Common Pleas" — and must be read accordingly.
Common Confusion
"Common place," "common pleas," and "common bench" are all variant names for the same institution and are used interchangeably in the old books. Researchers should not treat these as distinct courts or distinct jurisdictions. "Common bench" was the designation used during the Interregnum period in England when the monarchy was abolished; "common pleas" and "common place" are the pre- and post-Restoration forms. All three point to the same court.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is a research trap for the unwary. A reader scanning early English legal records, Year Books, or transcribed manuscripts may encounter "common place" and parse it as an adjective phrase rather than a proper noun. Missing this identification means misreading the procedural posture of the case entirely — whether a matter was heard at common pleas as opposed to King's Bench or Chancery is often dispositive for understanding the nature of the claim, the available remedy, and the applicable procedure.
The term appears with greatest frequency in sources predating systematic law reporting. Littleton's Tenures (cited by Burrill) and Finch's Law are characteristic habitats. Researchers working in the Year Books, Coke's Institutes, or other early modern English legal sources should treat any two-word "common place" as a court reference until context clearly indicates otherwise.
Because the Court of Common Pleas was abolished by the Judicature Acts of 1873–1875 and its jurisdiction merged into the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court, the term has no living procedural significance in English or American law. In American legal history, several states established their own Courts of Common Pleas modeled on the English original; those courts used the full "common pleas" form and not the abbreviated "common place" variant.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary, Rapalje & Lawrence, and Burrill's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement: "common place" is simply an old-book name for the Court of Common Pleas, nothing more and nothing less. Burrill is the most useful of the three for research purposes because he supplies source references — Littleton's Tenures section 94, Termes de la Ley, and Finch's Law — giving researchers a starting point for tracing the term's actual usage in period sources. Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence treat it as a bare cross-reference without citation support.
None of the three historical dictionaries address the orthographic variability between "common place" (two words), "common-place" (hyphenated), and "commonplace" (one word), or explain why the two-word form was used in legal contexts while the language was simultaneously consolidating the adjective into a single word. That gap is not resolved by the dictionary literature; it remains a feature of the manuscript and early print record that researchers must navigate on a source-by-source basis.
Jurisdictional Note
In American usage, Courts of Common Pleas exist or have existed in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Delaware, and several other states, but these courts invariably appear under the full "common pleas" designation. The two-word "common place" variant is an English phenomenon confined to early modern legal sources and does not appear in American court records or statutes.