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Bailiff's court

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The bailiff's court in Sansabury.

A bailiff's court is the palace and residence of a bailiff, the senior official with responsibility for a bailiwick, who is the bailiwick's representative of the governor with dominion over the governorate in which the jurisdiction of the bailiwick in question is to be found.

As an architectural form, the bailiff's court is typically a rectangular building with a central nave flanked by two or more longitudinal aisles, with the roof at two levels, being higher in the centre over the nave to admit a clerestory and lower over the side-aisles. A highly ornamented apse at one end, often framed by intricately decorated screens depicting scenes pertaining to the Human supremacy and submission to the Highest Divinity, usually contained the raised altar and tribunal occupied by the bailiff.

The bailiff's court is the primary venue wherein most local dignitaries, as well as meritorious subjects of the middling sort, may expect to encounter the authority of the Union-State during the course of their lives. As such, an absolute premium was placed upon impressing these mere provincials with the totalising nature of the might and majesty available to the coordinated state as it exercised dominion over the harmonious society. The intent with the architecture and the ornamentation was always to make the supplicant hopeless and overawed in the face of magisterial power.