7 and only as the old local courts fell into decay did denial of remedy at Westminster come to be equivalent to denial of right. This may serve to explain why at a very early time and in exceptional circumstances we do come across an action for slander in one of the king's courts. Prynne un earthed from an Exchequer roll of 1265 an entry which when Englished runs as follows : —
from a very remote time — in the face of the Lex Salica, who shall say how remote? — defamation was an actionable wrong. During the period when the jurisdiction of the king's courts was being rapidly extended by means of newly invented writs, those courts gave no remedy, for the right was quite adequately protected by the local courts, feudal and communal. Some cen turies afterwards these local courts had fallen into decay, chiefly because most of "Richard of Chesterford, a clerk of the Receipt of the Exchequer, complains that Bonenfant, a their business had been taken away from Jew of Exeter, on such a day, in the presence them by the royal courts. Then the royal of the clerks, Serjeants, and other ministers of courts had to take upon themselves the pro the Exchequer, spoke to him opprobrious and tection of character, and found some diffi contumelious words, charging him with being a culty in doing so. The time was past when falsifier of the king's rolls; and this he said to a new form of action could be created with his shame and damage which he would not have out statute, and their new duty they had to suffered for £100." 1 discharge by means of an action on the This certainly looks like a count in slander. special case. Meanwhile the ecclesiastical The Jew, making no effectual defence, was courts, which from a remote time had cor rected the slanderer for his soul's health, adjudged to be in mercy and to make sat isfaction to Richard for the trespass (" de had, owing to the decay of the local courts, transgressione praedicta "). Here the words come to be regarded as having, in some seem to have been spoken in the Exchequer, sort, an exclusive right to deal with defama and had not the plaintiff been an officer I tion, and the king's courts had some diffi of the Exchequer, that court would not have culty in establishing a distinction between slanders that are " merely spiritual " and been the proper tribunal for his action; still, the cause of action seems to have been those that are temporal, — a distinction to which some of the curiosities of our modern defamation, though aggravated it may be law may be traced. The imputation con by a contempt of court. veyed by the word " meretrix " is, we are told, The opinion, then, which I venture to sub " merely spiritual; " but the manorial rolls mit to readers of the " Green Bag " is that are full of proofs that during the Middle 1 Animadversions on Coke's Fourth Institute, p. 58, citing the Exchequer Memoranda for Mich. 50 Ages that word had unpleasant temporal results for him who used it. Hen. III.
