QUARTER-SESSIONS, a general court held quarterly by the justices of peace of each county. This court is appointed by stat. 2 Hen. V. c. 4. to be in the first week after Michaelmas-day; the first week after the Epiphany; the first week after the close of Easter; and in the week after the translation of Saint Thomas à Becket, or the 7th of July. The court is held before two or more justices of the peace, one of whom must be of the quorum. The jurisdiction of this court by 34 Ed. III. c. 1. extends to the trying and determining of all felonies and trespasses whatsoever, though they seldom, if ever, try any greater offence than small felonies within the benefit of clergy, their commission providing, that if any case of difficulty arises, they shall not proceed to judgment, but in the presence of one of the justices of the courts of king's bench or common pleas, or one of the judges of assize. And therefore murderers and other capital felons are usually remitted for a more solemn trial to the assizes. They cannot also try any new created offence, without express power given them by the statute which creates it. But there are many offences, and particular matters, which by particular statutes belong properly to this jurisdiction, and ought to be prosecuted in this court; as, the smaller misdemeanors against the public or commonwealth, not amounting to felony, and especially offences relating to the game, highways, alehouses, bastard children, the settlement and provision for the poor, vagrants, servants wages, apprentices, and popish recusants. Some of these are proceeded upon by indictment, and others in a summary way by motion and order thereupon: which order may, for the most part, unless guarded against by particular statutes, be removed into the court of king's bench, by writ of certiorari facias, and be there either qualified or confirmed. The records or rolls of the sessions are committed to the custody of a special officer, denominated the custos rotulorum. In most corporation towns there are quarter-sessions kept before justices of their own, within their respective limits, which have exactly the same authority as the general quarter-sessions of the county, except in very few instances: one of the most considerable of which is the matter of appeals from orders of removal of the poor, which, though they be from the orders of corporation justices, must be to the sessions of the county, by 8 and 9 Will. III. c. 30. In both corporations
Quarter-Staff, Quarters. rations and counties at large, there is sometimes kept a special or petty session, by a few justices, for dispatching smaller business in the neighbourhood between the times of the general sessions, as for licensing alehouses, passing the accounts of parish-officers, and the like.