Definition
Courts of Requests were minor civil tribunals established in England to resolve small debt and personal claims without the expense or formality of the common law courts. Functioning as local, summary courts, they offered tradespeople, merchants, and ordinary citizens a practical forum for recovering modest sums owed to them. Proceedings were informal by design: parties typically appeared without lawyers, evidence was heard quickly, and decisions were rendered by commissioners rather than trained judges.
These courts operated under local acts of Parliament, meaning their jurisdiction, procedure, and geographic reach varied considerably from one town or city to the next. London, Bristol, Manchester, and numerous other commercial centers each established their own Courts of Requests with individually tailored enabling legislation. The subject-matter jurisdiction was strictly limited to small monetary claims — often capped at amounts ranging from forty shillings to a few pounds, though the cap varied by locality and era.
Courts of Requests are also known in some historical sources as "Courts of Conscience," reflecting their founding purpose of reaching equitable outcomes in small disputes where strict common law procedure would be disproportionately burdensome.
Common Confusion
Courts of Requests should not be confused with the Court of Requests (singular), which was a separate and considerably more significant institution — an equitable court of the English royal household, sometimes called the "Court of Poor Men's Causes," that operated from roughly the early Tudor period until its abolition around the time of the Civil War in the seventeenth century. The royal Court of Requests heard petitions to the Crown for relief that could not be obtained at common law, and its jurisdiction was national in scope. The local Courts of Requests (plural), by contrast, were creatures of local statute with narrow monetary jurisdiction. Conflating the two in historical research produces significant errors of context and chronology.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter Courts of Requests most often when tracing small commercial disputes, debt recovery, and credit relationships in English social and legal history from roughly the late seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. Several research traps deserve attention.
First, because each Court of Requests was constituted by its own local act, there is no single enabling statute to locate. Researchers must identify the specific locality and then trace the relevant Parliamentary act, any subsequent amending legislation, and the court's own procedural rules. Records survive unevenly; some urban courts left substantial archives while others left almost nothing.
Second, the informal, non-lawyer character of these proceedings means that contemporary legal treatise writers often paid them little attention. Standard doctrinal sources of the period may not reflect how these courts actually operated in practice. Social history sources, trade records, and local archives are often more informative than legal texts for understanding their day-to-day function.
Third, Courts of Requests were largely superseded and ultimately abolished following the County Courts Act 1846, which created a national system of county courts to handle small civil claims. After 1846, references to "Courts of Requests" in English sources are almost always historical. Researchers working with post-1846 material should treat any mention of these courts as retrospective.
Fourth, the term "court of conscience" appears in some sources as a near-synonym and in others as a slightly distinct category. Whether a given source uses the terms interchangeably or draws a distinction requires careful attention to context and date.
The Selden Society publication noted by Bouvier — Vol. 12 of its series, containing select cases from this court — is a recognized primary source for scholars examining the royal Court of Requests. Researchers should be precise about which institution they are pursuing before consulting that volume.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's treatment of Courts of Requests is minimal. The 1898 edition does little more than gesture toward the Selden Society volume (Vol. 12) as a source of select cases, without providing substantive doctrinal description or historical narrative. This sparse treatment reflects the courts' status by the late nineteenth century: they had been abolished for roughly fifty years, were regarded as historical curiosities rather than living institutions, and occupied an ambiguous position between legal history and social history that general law dictionaries of the period had little occasion to develop.
What Bouvier does not address — and what researchers should supply from other sources — includes the courts' enabling legislation, the range of jurisdictional caps across localities, the role of lay commissioners, and the relationship between these local tribunals and the broader movement toward accessible civil justice that culminated in the county court system. The omission is not a defect unique to Bouvier; most legal dictionaries of the era gave these courts similarly brief treatment.
Jurisdictional Note
Courts of Requests were an exclusively English institution, though analogous small-claims tribunals with locally specific names existed in other jurisdictions. Researchers working in Scottish, Irish, or colonial legal history should not assume English Courts of Requests materials map directly onto those contexts. In American legal history, the term appears occasionally in colonial-era sources but did not take root as an institutional form in the new republic.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
No single Law Mind Encyclopedia entry addresses Courts of Requests directly. For related procedural and jurisdictional context, see: Criminal Contempt of Court (The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia, criminal_262) for background on court authority and enforcement; Family Court Jurisdiction and Unified Family Courts (The Law Mind Family Law Encyclopedia, family_214) for comparative treatment of specialized, limited-jurisdiction tribunals.