having to retire or demote two of the three Chief Justices to allow a single head of the Supreme Court, as this would have violated the constitutional principle that senior justices were irremovable. By sheer chance Fitzroy Kelly and Alexander Cockburn, Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer and Lord Chief Justice of England, respectively, both died in 1880, allowing the merger of the common law divisions of the Supreme Court into a single division, the Queen's Bench Division, under John Coleridge, who had been Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas and became Lord Chief Justice of England, by an Order in Council of 16 December 1880. At this point, the Exchequer of Pleas formally ceased to exist. Jurisdiction and relationship with other courts The Exchequer's position as a court originally came from an informal process of argument between the king and his debtors as to how much money was owed; by the 13th century, this had evolved into formal court proceedings. Therefore, its initial jurisdiction, as defined by the Statute of Rhuddlan, was as a court where only the king could bring cases. The Exchequer became the first "tax court", where the king was the plaintiff and the debtor the defendant. The king was represented by the Attorney General, allowing him to avoid much of the legal costs associated with a court case. The "next logical step" was to allow debtors to collect on their own debts in the Exchequer, so that they could better pay the king; this was done through the Writ of Quominus. The Exchequer also had sole jurisdiction to try cases against their own officials and other figures engaged in collecting the royal revenue. The court was also used to prosecute clerics who, while innocent, had come close to committing an infraction; as the plaintiff was represented by the Attorney General, the costs were reduced, and as the Attorney General had no incentive to compromise it was more threatening to the cleric. In 1649 the Exchequer formally extended its common law and equity jurisdiction, becoming a fully fledged court of law able to hear any civil case. The main focus of the Exchequer was the collection of royal revenue as part of the greater Exchequer, which was officially undertaken by the Lord High Treasurer. The Exchequer was unique in having jurisdiction in matters of both equity and the common law, the latter initially curtailed after