High, middle and low justice

High, middle and low justices are notions dating from Western feudalism to indicate descending degrees of judiciary power to administer justice by the maximal punishment the holders could inflict upon their subjects and other dependents.

Low justice regards the level of day-to-day civil actions, including voluntary justice, minor pleas, and petty offences generally settled by fines or light corporal punishment. It was held by many petty authorities, including many lords of the manor, who sat in justice over the serfs, unfree tenants, and freeholders on their land. Middle justice would involve full civil and criminal jurisdiction, except for capital crimes, and notably excluding the right to pass the death penalty, torture and severe corporeal punishment, which was reserved to authorities holding high justice, or the ius gladii ("right of the sword").

Although the terms high and low suggest a strict subordination, this was not quite the case; a case could often be brought in any of several courts, with the principle of "prevention" (in the etymological sense of Latin praevenire, "to come before") granting jurisdiction to the court in which the case was first filed or otherwise brought.

As a rule, each court administered justice in general (criminal cases were generally not separate from civil actions and other types of justice, while certain matters were separated such as canon law), as long as the matter was not reserved for a higher court or by virtue of some privilegium fori (e.g., of clerics to be judged in canon courts by other clergy, sometimes under ecclesiastical law, the origin of the English common-law concept—benefit of clergy). In addition to civil and criminal trials, the notion of justice also included voluntary justice, which is really the official recording of deeds (unilateral or bilateral) such as marital agreements, wills, grants, etc.

A right of appeal was not automatically available, only when explicitly established, and if so not always to a court of the superior political level and/or a higher degree of our trio. In fact, feudal justice was a labyrinth of specific customs and rules in nearly endless variation, not governed by any clear legal logic, and subject to significant historical evolution in time, though the largely customary law tended by nature to be quite conservative. In judicial matters—as in all spheres of life—feudal society did not see uniformity as either possible or necessarily desirable, each town and region having its own customs and ways of doing things, and resented attempts to interfere with them.

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