[1] This system of amercements is found in working order as early as the Norman Conquest of 1066, but was still regarded as an innovation at the accession in 1100 of Henry I.
Further, it became a recognized rule that the amount should be assessed by what was practically a jury of the culprit's neighbours; and attempts were also made to fix a maximum.
Such payments were known as “amercements.” For petty offences, men were constantly placed “in mercy”: for failure to attend meetings of a hundred or county; for false or mistaken verdicts; for infringements of forest rights.
(a) In the case of a commoner, the penalty under normal circumstances would be assessed provisionally by the king's justices on circuit, with the assistance of the sheriff.
(b) Thereafter, the sheriff or his serjeants, in full county court, with the assistance of twelve neighbours, taxed the amercements, reducing them in accordance with their knowledge of the wrong–doer's ability to pay.
It seems a safe inference that, on the priest pleading poverty, the question of his ability to pay was referred to local recognitors with the result stated.
This priest was subsequently pardoned altogether “because of his poverty.” Magna Carta in this chapter, treating of the amercements of freeholders, merchants and villeins, makes no reference to the part played by the king's justices, but only to the functions of the jury of neighbours.
Notwithstanding the efforts of Frederic Seebohm to find the origin of villeinage in the status of the serfs who worked for Roman masters upon British farms long before the Teutonic immigrations began, an older theory still holds the field, namely, that the abject villeins of Norman days were descendants of free–born ceorls of Anglo–Saxon stock.
These villagers were slowly sinking from their originally free estate during several centuries prior to 1066: but the process of their degradation was completed rapidly and roughly by the Norman conquerors.
Whichever theory may be the correct one, the position, economic, legal, and political, of villeins in the thirteenth century has been ascertained with certainty.
Economically they were part of the equipment of the manor of their lord, whose fields they had to cultivate as a condition of being left in possession of acres, in a sense, their own.
It is true that he had rights of a proprietary nature in the acres he claimed as his own; yet these were determined, not by the common law of England, but by “the custom of the manor,” or virtually at the will of the lord.
He attended the shire and hundred courts, and acted on juries, thus suffering still further encroachments on the scanty portion of time he might call his own, but preserving for a brighter day a vague tradition of his earlier liberty.
Professor Tait is inclined to read the word, in its present context, as equivalent either to “crops” or to “lands under cultivation,” and to translate the clause “saving his tillage.” What was the motive of these restrictions?
The capital had special privileges: in his Charter to London, Henry I promised that no citizen in misericordia pecuniae should pay a higher sum than 100 shillings (the amount of his wer).
This was confirmed in the Charter of Henry II, who declared “that none shall be adjudged for amercements of money, but according to the law of the city, which they had in the time of King Henry, my grandfather.” John's Charter to London of 17 June 1199, also referred to this; and the general confirmation of customs, contained in chapter 13 of Magna Carta, would further strengthen it.
In all probability, the earlier grant covered trivial offences only (such as placed the offender in the king's hands de misericordia pecuniae).
The present chapter is wider in its scope, applying to grave offences also, and embracing merchants everywhere, not merely the burgesses of chartered towns.
The spirit of the restriction placed by this chapter and by the common law upon the King's prerogative of inflicting amercements could often be evaded.
The Crown might imprison its victims for an indefinite period, and then graciously allow them to offer large payments to escape death by fever or starvation in a noisome gaol: enormous fines might thus be taken, while royal officials were forbidden to inflict arbitrary amercements.
With the gradual elimination of the voluntary element the word “fine” came to bear its modern meaning, while “amercement” dropped out of ordinary use.
In force since November 2001, Alberta's régime now provides[7] a helpful six-step flowchart diagram,[8] and remarks that "... the Civil Forfeiture process operates regardless of whether charges are laid, or convictions are obtained.
[14] When "Bill 5", which was later to become the Civil Forfeiture Act, was introduced by British Columbia Solicitor-General Rich Coleman, he made liberal use of the "organised crime" fear, uncertainty and doubt tactic.
"[16] In Saskatchewan, a man had his truck amerced in 2010 when, for want of $60 worth of gas, he trafficked two tablets of Oxycontin to an undercover police officer.
The province has set up a civil forfeiture unit, which receives cases referred from law enforcement agencies where there is evidence of wrongdoing but criminal charges are not laid, such as bootlegging or selling stolen property.