Court of Common Pleas, and Supreme Court of Judicature, High Court of Justice, Common...

CP 16

1839-1878

The index to debtors and accountants to the crown established under the Judgments Act of 1839, providing protection to purchasers of estates.

There is also a single register of writs of execution, 1860 to 1862, serving a similar purpose and kept under the requirements of the Law of Property (Amendment) Act 1860 (23 & 24 Vict, c 38).

Many of the entries relate to the acceptance of offices under the crown, especially local offices under the Boards of Excise, Customs, Stamps and Taxes, and Inland Revenue, which involved the office-holder undertaking a financial obligation to the crown, the amount of which is given.

Two sequences of volumes, those in CP 16/11-16 and CP 16/17-22, overlap in date. Each volume is divided into alphabetical sub-sequences of surnames, each of them including entries in chronological, not strict alphabetical, order. Each double-page opening includes columns for: surname; Christian names; address; title, trade or profession; the date on which the memorandum had been left; the category of transaction involved, such as judgment, obligation, acceptance of office, etc; the date of the transaction; the title of the case, or the name of the office, etc, involved; and the amount of the debt, damages, costs or moneys involved. A final column, blank in most entries, records any satisfactions made. They are entered in red ink, and other parts of those entries where they occur have been stamped 'Satisfied', also in red; in the earlier volumes the same entries are also stamped with a large green 'R', but that practice ceased after 1854. In some volumes satisfactions are given a serial number, but it is uncertain to what other documentation it refers.

Registers from 1869 are held at the Land Registry, to which the responsibility for registering judgments was transferred under the Land Charges Act 1900.

Public Record(s)

English

• Court of Common Pleas, 1194-1875
• Supreme Court of Judicature, Common Pleas Division, 1875-1880

43 volume(s)

Topics

Taxation

Trade and commerce

The original memoranda or minutes were destroyed under schedules of 1884 and 1901, as were other subsidiary documents connected with registration.

The index established was by the Judgments Act of 1839, which was intended to improve the protection of purchasers of estates against judgments, crown debts, lis pendens and fiats in bankruptcy, previously dependent on an alphabetical docket of judgments in actions of debt kept under an act of 1692 (4 Wm & Mary, c 20). The safeguard that it provided had been replaced by the new series of registers of judgments in the courts of common law established under an act of 1838 (now in CP 32), the scope of which was widened by further provisions in this subsequent act. It recorded the name of any person whose estate would be affected by any judgment, statute, recognizance, inquisition, obligation, specialty or acceptance of office, for example in the customs or excise, which would leave him in debt to the crown; it could be searched after the payment of a fee.