Catalogue description Court of Common Pleas: Remembrance Rolls

The prothonotaries, 'chief clerks', were the most senior officers of the court other than the custos brevium. By the late fourteenth century there were two of them, and a third was added sometime between 1457 and 1460. During the later sixteenth century, as the long process by which paper pleadings all but replaced oral pleadings in court came to fruition, the prothonotaries came increasingly to monopolise the recording of pleas and the later stages of cases, a function earlier shared to some extent with the more numerous filazers, lesser clerks dealing mainly with mesne process for cases from particular blocs of counties. In 1573 the court decided that from then onwards filazers could enter only pleas in common form, and in 1616 or 1617 the court made an order preventing filazers from entering any of the stages of a case after the defendant made his first appearance. The prothonotaries became technical experts in the form of writs, plea roll entries and even forms of pleading and procedure, and as such were relied upon by the judges; they frequently wrote law reports. As time went on the work of entering pleas and making out writs came to be done by the attorneys, although the prothonotaries continued to receive the fees, and before the abolition of their offices in 1837 their main task had come to be the giving of technical advice and the taxing of costs.

As the amount and complexity of their work and its documentation increased, the prothonotaries kept increasingly formal aides memoires, in the form of parchment rolls, to enable them to keep a record of the work they were doing and, what was equally important to them, the fees to which they were entitled for doing it. The earliest such series, to judge by the surviving examples, was the docket rolls, now in CP 60, which begin in 1509. They make only brief references to plea roll entries, and were probably to enable calculations to be made of the sums owed to them by attorneys for the making of plea roll entries. Far more complex and detailed were the series known as 'remembrances', which are found here. They were always kept on a term basis, although many of the rolls consist of several term sections filed together. They were kept at least as early as 1503, but the first surviving roll in the series (CP 45/1) was kept by John Jennour, second prothonotary from 1513 to 1542, for Easter term 1524 to Hilary term 1525.