A Concise History of the Common Law. Theodore F. T. Plucknett

or the Council, but instead we find an endeavour to define the limits of the two jurisdictions.⁶ In this there was naturally some conflict, especially as Chancery already enjoined parties from pursuing common law remedies, and the common law courts sometimes talked about prohibiting suitors from going into equity, and at least once threatened to release by habeas corpus one who had been committed by the Chancellor for contempt.¹ However, occasional outbursts of ill-feeling such as this contrast with the general atmosphere, which seems to have been one of mutual tolerance. Indeed, in 1464 the Court of Common Pleas was once given the chance of recognising an equitable estate, with the reasoning that “the law of chancery is the common law of the land”. This golden opportunity was lost,² and so we had to wait four hundred years for the fusion of law and equity.

EQUITY UNDER THE TUDORS

      The sixteenth century shows us Council government at its best. The courts of Star Chamber, Requests and High Commission collaborated in the most intimate manner with the Privy Council in the task of government. All the troubles brought about by religious dissension, economic distress, foreign wars and domestic sedition were handled courageously and effectively by the newer institutions. Nowhere will be found so striking a contrast with the inadequacy of the Lancastrian age. No doubt there was some ruthlessness: legal and constitutional barriers had to yield when the State was believed to be in danger—and it certainly was on more than one occasion. The Privy Council itself exercised a jurisdiction more vague even than that of its offshoots, and all the conciliar courts inflicted “unusual” and sometimes picturesque punishments when occasion demanded. Torture was not unknown to its procedure: sedition, defamation, heresy, unlicensed printing, playacting, perjury, riot—all these might be visited with fine and imprisonment, while all sorts of mercantile disputes (especially those involving aliens), domestic disputes and private litigation of all sorts flowed in an ever-growing stream through the Council chamber, in spite of all attempts to divert it to other courts of law or equity.³

      By the middle of the sixteenth century the Court of Chancery had a great deal of business and a large and complicated establishment. In theory it remained, almost to the end, one court with a single judge, the Chancellor himself, but the legal work alone, without considering the political duties attached to the office, was very heavy and devices had to be found for lightening the burden. Minor matters were left to the Masters in Chancery, while the Master of the Rolls was coming into prominence as an assistant, and sometimes as a deputy, to the Chancellor.⁴

      The tolerably good relations which we have seen existing in the fifteenth century between common law courts and Chancery were interrupted during the chancellorship of Cardinal Wolsey (1515-1529). The list of charges against the Cardinal¹ accuse him of misusing injunctions as well as publicly insulting common law judges. The fact that harmony once again reigned under his successor, Sir Thomas More, would seem to indicate that the fault lay as much with Wolsey’s character as with his policy. More, trained as a common lawyer, even suggested to the judges that they should adopt equitable principles and so render injunctions unnecessary.² He at least seems to have thought this a practicable solution, but again the judges replied with a non possumus. The one hopeful sign was that there was no distinction of a common law bar from a Chancery bar; as Bacon was able to remark much later, many of the common law judges had either sat as commissioners in Chancery, or had practised there earlier in their careers. Not until the accession of James I did discord reappear.