A county possessing certain Royal privileges, created originally for defence of the frontier against the Welsh, the Scotch and the French. They were Chester, Lancaster, Durham, Kent, Shropshire, Pembrokeshire, and Hexhamshire. Only the three first named retained any of their privileges beyond the sixteenth century.
A term applied to any overthrow of free institutions by military intervention, but used especially to denote the bold stroke of Louis Napoleon, who by a display of military force in the Paris streets in December, 1851, and the imprisonment of the Republican members of the Chamber, succeeded in getting himself proclaimed Consul, and, later, Emperor.
An ancient feudal court in Jersey, having jurisdiction over all disputed questions as to landed property.
Assemblies of the Barons, called, on the great festivals of the year, by the early kings of France and England.
A court of the old Norman Manor, summoned to settle all questions arising out of the cultivation of the demesne land of the Manor.
A baronial court in feudal times held to decide questions arising out of the tenure of land by villeins.
Under Henry I the Hundred Court was so called, when it sat for the purpose of trying criminal cases under the presidency of the Sheriff.
_See_ Audiencias, Augmentations, Aulic, Austrägal, College of Justice, Chambre, Confines, Consistorium, Curia Regis, Four Burghs, Great Session, Haute Cour, Heemraden, High Commission, Jews, Manor, Parlement, Piés Poudrées, Reichskammergericht, Requests, Salford, Star Chamber, Tribunal, Tynwald, Vehmgericht, Wales.
An Act passed in 1671 declaring nose-slitting or other mutilation of the person to be a felony. It was passed in consequence of a dastardly attack upon Sir James Coventry, a Member of Parliament, who, having incurred the enmity of the Court party by some comments in the House on Charles the Second’s _liaison_ with Nell Gwynne, was waylaid on his way home by Sir Thomas Sandys and some of the King’s friends, who dragged him from his coach and slit his nose to the bone.
Bands of British marauders who infested the banks of the Hudson River during the American War of Independence. The name is now applied to the cattlemen on the ranches in the Far West.