Court of King's Bench (England)
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The Court of King's Bench (or Court of Queen's Bench during the reign of a Queen) was one of the senior courts of common law in England, and the most powerful of them. In its early days the King's Bench would sit wherever the King was, but by Magna Carta in 1215, it was required to be fixed in one place. It sat thereafter, for six and a half centuries, in Westminster Hall.
In times of plague the King's Bench left London; in 1665 it sat in St Albans.
The Court was formally known as The Court of the King Before the King Himself, although after the mediæval period the sovereign did not in practice sit in the Court. (King James I did seek to sit on hearings in the King's Bench but it was a brief experiment.)
The president of the Court was the Lord Chief Justice.
