assizes
The Oxford English Dictionary, in its twelfth subsection
under the substantive "assize," explains these courts of trial as
follows:
The sessions held periodically in each county of England, for the
purpose of administering civil and criminal justice, by judges
acting under certain special commissions (chiefly and usually,
but not exclusively, being ordinary judges of the superior
courts, or, after 1875, of the Supreme Court). It was provided
by Magna Carta that the judges should visit each county once
every year to take assizes (i.e. try writs of assize) of novel
disseisin, mort d'ancestre, and darreine presentment (so that the
jury who constituted the Grand Assize . . . might not be obliged to
travel from remote corners of England to appear in court at
Westminster). Thence the names assizes, and justices or judges
of assize, still retained by these circuit courts and itinerant
judges, after their judicial functions had been greatly extended
in various directions, especially in that of the trial of
felonies and offences. Assizes were abolished by the Courts Act,
1971; their criminal jurisdiction was transferred to the Crown
Courts.
Of course, Ireland in the
eighteenth-century had not yet been joined administratively to the
mechanisms of the United Kingdom as it would become with the Act of Union
of 1801. But in practical
effect the nominally independent country, in its administration of
justice, modeled itself on the English system.
