Exchequer of Pleas

The Exchequer of Pleas was an English and Welsh court that operated from around the 1190s, when it split off from the curia regis as a collateral department of the Court of Exchequer, until its abolition on 16 December 1880. It began as a revenue court collecting debts owed to the Crown, but over its nearly seven-hundred-year existence it grew to hear common law disputes between private parties and, from the late fifteenth century, equity cases as well, largely through the legal fiction of the Writ of Quominus, by which a debtor could bring a private suit before the Exchequer on the argument that settling it would let the debtor pay the king. It lost its equity jurisdiction under the Administration of Justice Act 1841, and the Judicature Acts of 1873 to 1875 finally merged its remaining functions into the Queen's Bench Division of the new Supreme Court of Judicature.