High, middle and low justice

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High, middle and low justices are notions dating from Western feudalism to indicate descending degrees of judicial power to administer justice by the maximal punishment the holders could inflict upon their subjects and other dependents. The scale of punishment generally matched the scale of spectacle (e.g. a public hanging = high justice), so that in France, Paul Friedland argues: "The degree of spectacle [was] originally the basis for a distinction between high and low justice", with an intervening level of 'middle justice', characterised by limited or modest spectatorship, added around the end of the fourteenth century.^[1]

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 lesser 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 corporal punishment, which was reserved to authorities holding high justice, or the ius gladii ("right of the sword").