The assizes were a kind of court in Britain, in the old days, when a judge travelled from town to town to hear serious cases. People said “the assizes” — almost always in the plural — the way we say “the court is in town.” A town would wait for the assize judge to arrive; local people might be called to a jury; then the judge moved on. Though actually this is history now: England and Wales replaced the assizes with the Crown Court in the early 1970s, so you will meet the word in old novels, legal history, and place names, not in a modern British courtroom. Other countries never used this system, so a student in Taiwan can treat it as a UK history word. Do not picture a building that stayed put; the point was the travelling judge.

巡迴法庭（英國舊制，法官到各城鎮審案）