108 The Star Chamber : its Practice and Procedure, 



notwithstanding, Hudson says it tc hath been nsed in all ages/ 5 

 I have not been able to ascertain what it was. It seems to 

 have been at one time the punishment for perjury, " bat since 

 Elizabeth, a punishment for oppressors and great deceits. 55 

 " Sometimes the punishment is by the wisdom of the court 

 invented in some new manner for new offences, as for Traske, 

 who raised Judaism up from death, and forbade the eating of 

 swine 5 s flesh. He was sentenced to be fed with swine 5 s flesh 

 when he was in prison. 55 In a civil cause damages were 

 assessed by the court, the intervention of a jury being a thing 

 unknown there. 



The orders and sentences of the Star Chamber were en- 

 forced, and contempts were punished by fine and imprison- 

 ment ; but Hudson says, and we may without any effort believe 

 him, " there was scarce a man found so impudent as would 

 struggle with the sentence of this high court. 55 



Such were the practice and procedure of the Star Chamber 

 administering the judicial powers of the Privy Council. So 

 great an authority, so undefined, and so avowedly beyond the 

 control of either statute or common law, could not fail to be 

 abused, however beneficial the exercise of it might originally 

 have been. As satisfying a want which the known law did 

 not meet, as a corrector of abuses, " creeping into the Com- 

 monwealth, 55 as the curber of licentious and violent persons, 

 and as the means of putting in action the king 5 s patria potes- 

 tas for the protection of women, wards, and adolescents, and 

 for other domestic purposes, the Star Chamber was well suited 

 to the men and manners of a half-barbarous era. It was, also, 

 perhaps, justified by the exceptional position in which Eliza- 

 beth and her government found themselves, and it is certain 

 that in Elizabeth 5 s reign the authority of the Star Chamber 

 was at its height. But such an institution was altogether un- 

 fitted for Englishmen of the time of James I. and Charles I. 

 The ills which it was designed to remedy had, many of them, 

 disappeared, and such as remained the common law courts and 

 the Court of Chancery were quite able to cope with. As a 

 matter of fact, the Star Chamber had of late years relinquished 

 to those courts a vast amount of its business. It applied itself as 

 an instrument of state rather than of law, to the punishment of 

 " mere political offences, 55 and gradually intensified the extra- 

 vagance of its decrees till it raged with that " savage vigour 55 

 which procured its overthrow. 



Almost the first business of the House of Commons in the 

 first Session of 1641 was to take into its serious consideration 

 the petitions of Prynne, Burton, Bastwtick, Alexander Leigh- 

 ton, and Lilburne, who had suffered the worst of tho Star 

 Chambers terrors, for offences purely political, and some of 



