Definition
The Crown Side was the criminal department of the Court of King's (or Queen's) Bench in English legal history. It handled prosecutions and other criminal matters brought in the name of the Crown, as distinguished from the court's civil business, which was conducted on the Plea Side. The Crown Side was administered through the Crown Office, which managed the clerical and procedural machinery of criminal proceedings in that court.
Common Confusion
CROWN SIDE vs. PLEA SIDE: These are the two functional divisions of the Court of King's/Queen's Bench, and researchers unfamiliar with English court structure sometimes conflate them or treat the court as a single-purpose tribunal. The Crown Side handled criminal and quasi-criminal matters; the Plea Side handled civil litigation between private parties. A historical source referencing proceedings "in the King's Bench" without specifying the side may require context to determine which branch was involved.
CROWN SIDE vs. CROWN OFFICE: The Crown Office was the administrative office through which Crown Side business was transacted. The two terms are closely related but not identical — Crown Side designates the jurisdictional division; Crown Office designates the clerical machinery. Historical dictionaries sometimes treat them interchangeably or redirect one to the other.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is essentially dormant in modern legal usage but appears frequently in pre-twentieth-century English legal materials, treatises, and procedural texts. Researchers working with historical English court records, commentary on common law criminal procedure, or reprints of Blackstone and Stephen will encounter it regularly.
The key navigational point: when a historical source refers to the "Crown Side," it is anchoring a proceeding in the criminal jurisdiction of King's/Queen's Bench specifically — not in a separate criminal court. This matters because the Court of King's Bench exercised supervisory and original criminal jurisdiction simultaneously with its civil business, and the two sides generated distinct procedural records. A researcher tracing a historical criminal matter through King's Bench must look to Crown Side records and Crown Office filings, not to the plea rolls or Plea Side materials.
The term also flags a particular era of English court organization. The Court of King's Bench, along with Common Pleas and Exchequer, was absorbed into the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court of Justice under the Judicature Acts of 1873–1875. After that consolidation, the Crown Side/Plea Side distinction dissolved into the unified court structure. References to the Crown Side therefore reliably date a source or proceeding to pre-Judicature Act English practice.
American researchers should note that colonial and early American legal writing frequently borrowed English procedural vocabulary, including occasional references to Crown Side practice, but no American jurisdiction replicated this court structure directly. American uses of the phrase are typically descriptive of English practice, not operative references to domestic institutions.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries agree closely on the core definition. Bouvier is the most precise, identifying the Crown Side as "the criminal side of the court of king's bench" and explicitly contrasting it with "the pleas side, which transacts the civil business," with references to Blackstone's Commentaries and Stephen's Commentaries as primary authorities. Burrill echoes this and adds the connection to the Crown Office, pointing to both Blackstone volume 4 (criminal law) and volume 3 (civil procedure) to frame the distinction. Black's entry, as preserved in the source material, appears to be fragmentary — the text breaks off mid-sentence — but the substance aligns with the others.
All three dictionaries treat this as a term of English law requiring no substantial elaboration beyond the structural description. None of them addresses the post-Judicature Act obsolescence of the term, which is the most practically important fact for a researcher encountering it in historical sources. That gap is significant: a researcher relying solely on these dictionary entries would know what the Crown Side was but might not recognize that the institution had already ceased to exist by the time many of the treatises citing it were being reprinted or revised.
Jurisdictional Note
Crown Side is a term of English law with no direct American equivalent. It applies exclusively to the historical structure of the Court of King's/Queen's Bench prior to the Judicature Acts of 1873–1875. Researchers working with Scottish, Irish, or colonial materials should verify whether parallel terminology was in use in those jurisdictions before treating English Crown Side references as portable.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Court of King's Bench; Crown Office; Judicature Acts