Catalogue description Court of King's Bench: Crown Side and Plea Side: Miscellanea

Mainly miscellaneous items relating to Crown Side business of the King's Bench, some of which rightly belong in other series, mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but with some material from the early seventeenth.

The main contents are: affidavits (otherwise in KB 1) in support of or in opposition to informations relating to the breach of the penal statutes against smuggling, mostly sworn before commissioners by customs officers in London and in provincial ports such as Exeter, Liverpool and Dartmouth; docket rolls of bails from 1609 to 1649; stray recorda and bills files from the reign of Charles I; a set of presentments of the petty constables of Middlesex from 1786 to 1837; records of cases concerning offices initiated by the attorney general on the king's behalf in the Court of Chancery which were referred to King's Bench; interrogatories and the related depositions or examinations resulting from alleged contempts of the court; a memorandum roll of crown business compiled in Hilary term 1638; a collection of early nineteenth century accounts and correspondence mainly of the chief clerk, including some tradesmens' bills, such as those of cleaners, coal merchants, stationers, carpenters, ironmongers and glaziers; and accounts on palm leaves in KB 32/28 derived from a case arising in Bombay. There are also specimens of documents, mostly bails, the bulk of which have been destroyed under a schedule of 1907, including some apparently chosen to illustrate the signatures of judges from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries

It also includes some Plea Side bills files (otherwise in KB 152), and some recorda files which include both Crown and Plea Side recorda (otherwise in KB 145), and a few specimens of records of the King's Bench Division of the High Court of Justice subsequent to 1875.