Most folks in the middle ages lived in agricultural villages. If they committed a crime, they would be tried when the judge arrived in town on his regular circuit. The accused would not be jailed in the mean time since it was both an expense to do so and because his labor was needed in the fields. His appearance at court was guaranteed by the fellow members of his Frank Pledge. The Frank Pledge was 12 guys who were sort of legally bound to one another upon becoming adults for the purpose of being responsible for each other. The other 11 had to make the guy appear before the judge.
That’s how it worked in the rural areas. But the cities were different in that the population contained a lot of itinerant folks and immigrants from out of town. How did the medieval justice system ensure the appearance of the accused at court hearings? Requiring bail? Seizing his goods if he was a no-show?
I was under the impression that a medieval city with a charter typically got the power to try and punish (relatively minor?) crimes, and that the mayor, city council, or equivalent sat as judges. Which means no wait for a judge to ride circuit as in the countryside. Here is an article about medieval York, in England stating that the sheriff held court three times a week, and the mayor also held court.
Before the real historians get here, I’ll suggest you focus things a bit more narrowly than ‘the middle ages’. That’s kind of a big time period (I assume you mean more or less Europe, but that’s a pretty wide geographical area too). I really doubt legal systems in England in 1600 were much like the Roman/Byzantine Empire in 700CE, or Kiev Rus in 1000, or Iceland during the Sagas, or Florence in 1500 etc. etc. Maybe you could focus on the time/place where the “Frank Pledge” institution existed?
In doing some research, I see the Frank Pledge referred to as a Tithing consisting of ten men. John Bredins post makes sense to me since I have heard of English cities receiving the right to try criminals as a privilege. Specifically, the Cinque Ports in England getting the rights to both try criminals who committed crimes outside the city and trying criminals who were residents of the city but committed their crimes elsewhere. I guess cities had the resources to speed up the justice process.
For civil trials, many European countries followed (and still follow) the Roman Law principle of “he who is silent, loses”; if you’ve got a suit and you don’t attend the trial, you concede.
For criminal trials, there was no waiting for CSI. There were jails; there were things that could be decided at lower levels. The appropriate judge would change again by location and even by the people involved; many groups (religious ones, guilds, etc.) could try their own so long as things were below a certain level and internal to the group (again this is something inherited from Roman law). Someone who was just being a pain, for example what’s now called drunk and disorderly, might be tossed into jail and just let go once they’d cleared up, or might need to go in front of a judge in the morning, depending on local laws. I’ve never heard of a bail system, but IANAHistorian. For the rural villages in my own area, the appropriate judge lived in town and if he was away had to leave someone to represent him; there was simply no waiting time unless the judge was abed with fevers. Civil trials could take longer, among other things because there’s less at play in them.
And of course, things would also change not just by location by through time. The Magna Carta is from 1215; that’s the second half of the Middle Ages. The legal system of Navarre wasn’t put down in writing until we imported a king who was used to paperwork (Theobald I); we know that there had been several big reformers before him (Sancho III, for example); Carlos III rehashed and simplified the whole taxation structure (and I don’t know how was Navarre for debtors’ prison, but I do know it was a big thing in many countries) and created a sort of Supreme Court that people could call upon in his stead. Before Carlos III’s creation of that court, anybody who had received a judgement and didn’t agree had to ask for the king’s own review; now that could take a damn big while…
In England the larger towns and cities, including London, were divided into wards, which functioned as the rough equivalents of hundred courts. Frankpledge was administered via them. In London this was done by the alderman at the wardmoot. Freemen were usually exempt. That was because freemen of that town or city were assumed to be settled members of the local community and, in the specific case of London, because they could be regarded as already pledged to the other members of their livery company. Of course, naturally enough, over time frankpledge in urban communities became primarily a way of raising money.
Larger towns and cities in medieval England tended to have their own law courts which could deal with more minor cases, either criminal or civil, swiftly. Only more serious cases had to be delayed to be referred upwards to the assizes etc.