Annual files containing records of proceedings in inferior courts, such as general eyres, assizes, gaol delivery, oyer and terminer, Common Pleas, Chancery common law side, and local liberty courts, including especially those of boroughs, returned into King's Bench after the issue of writs such as certiorari, mandamus or error which exercised the court's superior jurisdiction over them.
The files thus preserve many records of proceedings in courts both central and local whose original rolls and files have not survived, and also of some local courts which were not courts of record. For part of the period physically smaller process records were filed in subsidiary Precepta Recordorum files which were, and in some cases still are, attached to the main file by the thong.
In the fourteenth century the files contain original petitions to the king's Council or Parliament with related matter which were sent on to the King's Bench under writs of mittimus for it to take appropriate action upon them. Until the fifteenth century the files contain a variety of inquisitions, extents and miscellaneous items of interest (for example, the confession of a French spy in 4 Richard II), and in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries they include bills for the furnishing, equipment and maintenance of the court's venue in Westminster Hall.
In the seventeenth century King's Bench jurisdiction over local government increased, and the files increasingly reflect that trend, coming predominantly to contain matters arising before justices of the peace and borough courts, and by 1677 the files were predominantly Crown Side files.