Willis: Anglo-American Law 103 
chancellor, treasurer, keeper of the privy seal (or two of 
them) , with a bishop and a temporal lord of the Privy Coun- 
cil, and the two chief justices of the King's Bench and Com- 
mon Pleas (or two other justices in their absence), and it 
had authority to call before it and examine all those charged 
with any misbehavior and to punish them on conviction. It 
also exercised a certain amount of civil jurisdiction and ad- 
miralty jurisdiction by and against aliens and corporations. 
Its procedure was taken from the canon law. It was a law 
unto itself as to substantive law. At first it was essentially 
a court for the poor against the rich and powerful, but under 
the first two Stuarts it became a cruel political court for di- 
vines and king. The great complaint against it was its 
inquisitorial procedure. It was abolished in 1641 on account 
of its manifold abuses and the King's Bench took over its 
jurisdiction. Its procedure perished with it, but its work in 
reforming the old criminal law remained. 
Somehow or other, in the Court of Star Chamber and the 
Court of Chancery, England stumbled onto a scheme for rec- 
onciling permanence with progress. Equity took its dominant 
substantive law ideas from the common law ; imitated it where 
possible and departed from it to Roman law, etc., where com- 
mon honesty required it; under the Tudors was not bound 
by precedents ; and thus composed an appendix to and pre- 
served the old private law. The Star Chamber in the same 
way supplied the deficiencies of the old mediaeval criminal 
law and thus preserved it. In thi^ way the common law 
passed scatheless thru the critical sixteenth century, and was 
ready to stand up against tyranny in the seventeenth. The 
Star Chamber and Chancery might have been dangerous to 
political liberties, yet but for them the old law would have 
utterly broken down for its badness, and might have been sup- 
planted by the Roman law or no law but despotism. 
During the reign of Henry VIII a great number of new 
courts were created, such as the Court of Augmentation for 
monasteries and abbey lands ; the Court of Wards and Livery 
with jurisdiction over the king's wards and their estates; the 
Court of Requests, a court of equity for poor suitors ; the Court 
of the Marches of Wales; and the High Court of Delegates 
with appellate jurisdiction over the Ecclesiastical Courts; and 
in Elizabeth's reign was established a Court of High Com- 
