Court of Chancery
The Court of Chancery was a court of equity in England and Wales that followed a set of loose rules to avoid a slow pace of change and possible harshness of the common law. The Chancery had jurisdiction over all matters of equity, including trusts, land law, the estates of lunatics and the guardianship of infants.
Its initial role differed somewhat: as an extension of the lord chancellor's role as Keeper of the King's Conscience, the court was an administrative body primarily concerned with conscientious law. Thus the Court of Chancery had a far greater remit than the common-law courts and was far more flexible.
Until the 19th century, the Court of Chancery could apply a far wider range of remedies than common law courts, such as specific performance and injunctions, and had some power to grant damages in special circumstances. With the shift of the Exchequer of Pleas towards a common law court and loss of its equitable jurisdiction by the Administration of Justice Act 1841, the Chancery became the only national equitable body in the English legal system.
Scholars estimate that the Court of Chancery formally split from and became independent of the curia regis in the mid-14th century, at which time it consisted of the lord chancellor and his personal staff, the Chancery. Initially an administrative body with some judicial duties, the Chancery experienced an explosive growth in its work during the 15th century, particularly under the House of York ; academics attribute this to its becoming an almost entirely judicial body. From the time of Queen Elizabeth I onwards the Court was severely criticised for its slow pace, large backlogs, and high costs. Those problems persisted until its dissolution, despite being mitigated somewhat by reforms, particularly during the 19th century.
Attempts at fusing the Chancery with the common law courts began in the 1850s, and finally succeeded with the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1873 and the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1875, which dissolved the Chancery and created a new unified High Court of Justice, with the Chancery Division – one of five divisions of the High Court – succeeding the Court of Chancery as an equitable body.
For much of its existence the court was formally led by the lord chancellor, assisted by the judges of the common-law courts. The staff of the court included a large number of clerks, led by the master of the rolls, who regularly heard cases on his own. In 1813 a vice-chancellor was appointed to deal with the Chancery's increasing backlogs, and two more vice-chancellors were appointed in 1841. Lord chancellors sold offices of the Chancery for much of its history, raising large amounts of money. Many of the clerks and other officials held sinecures; the holders, in lieu of wages, charged increasingly exorbitant fees to process cases – one of the main reasons for the high cost of bringing a case to the Court of Chancery.
The 19th century saw the abolition of many sinecure offices and the institution of a wage and pension for the lord chancellor to curb the sale of offices; and later the right to appoint officials was transferred from the chancellor to the Crown.
History
Origins
The Court of Chancery originated, as did the other high courts before 1875, in the Norman curia regis or King's Council, maintained by most early rulers of England after 1066. Under the feudal system, the council was made up of the monarch, the Great Officers of the Crown and anyone else the monarch allowed to attend. Its jurisdiction was virtually unlimited, with executive, judicial and legislative functions. This large body contained lawyers, peers, and members of the church, many of whom lived far from London. It soon became apparent that it was too unwieldy to deal with the nation's day-to-day business. As a result, a smaller curia was formed to deal with the regular business of the country, and this soon split into various courts: first the exchequer of pleas, to deal with finance, and then the Court of Common Pleas, to deal with "common" cases.The Chancery started as the personal staff of the lord chancellor, described as "a great secretarial bureau, a home office, a foreign office, and a ministry of justice". The earliest reference to legal issues being sent to him is from 1280, when Edward I of England, annoyed with the number of cases coming to him which could have been dealt with by other elements of his administration, passed a statute saying that:
all petitions which touch the Seal shall come first to the chancellor; and those which touch the Exchequer, to the exchequer, and those which touch the justices, or the law of the land, to the justices; and those which touch the Jews, to the justices of the Jews. And if the affairs are so great, or if they are of grace, that the chancellor and the others cannot do it without the king, then they shall bring them with their own hands to the king to know his pleasure; so that no petitions shall come before the king, and his Council, but by the hands of his said chancellor, and the other chief ministers; so that the king and his Council may, without the load of other business, attend to the great business of his realm, and of other foreign countries.
Records show dozens of early cases being sent to the lord chancellor and master of the rolls, but at the time the chancellor had no specific jurisdiction to deal with them; the cases were referred to him only as a matter of convenience. Under Edward II the chancellor dedicated set days to hearing pleas, as documented in the records of the Parliament of Lincoln in 1315, which also show that some cases were heard by his personal staff, the Chancery, and not by the chancellor. By 1320 requests were regularly sent there, and heard by the judges of the common law courts, with the rules used to settle cases being those of "law or reason", sometimes simply "reason", a far more liberal and adjustable approach than the common law.
Rise and early years
The Chancery came to prominence after the decline of the Exchequer, dealing with the law of equity, something more fluid and adaptable than the common law. The early Court of Chancery dealt with verbal contracts, matters of land law and matters of trusts, and had a very liberal view when setting aside complaints; poverty, for example, was an acceptable reason to cancel a contract or obligation. Complaints were normally brought via a bill or petition, which had to show that the common law did not provide a remedy for the problem. The Chancery writs were in French, and later English, rather than the Latin used for common law bills. In the reign of Edward III, the court found a fixed home at Westminster Hall, where it sat almost continually until its dissolution. Before this, justice was difficult to dispose because the lord chancellor had to travel with the King wherever he went.File:Microcosm of London Plate 094 - Westminster Hall edited.jpg|thumb|alt=A very large room, with a high vaulted ceiling, mostly empty save for a few small groups of people.|Westminster Hall, where the Court sat almost continuously from the reign of Edward III until its dissolution in 1875
By 1345 the lord chancellor began to be seen as the leader of the Court of Chancery, rather than as a representative of the king, and writs and bills were addressed directly to him. Under Richard II it became practice to consider the Chancery separate from the curia; academic William Carne considers this a key moment in confirming the independence of the Court of Chancery. The chancellor and his clerks often heard the cases directly, rather than having them referred to the council itself; occasionally a committee of lay and church members disposed of them, assisted by the judges of the common law courts. John Baker argues that it was the late 14th century that saw Chancery procedure become fixed, citing the work done by John Waltham as master of the rolls between 1381 and 1386, and notes that this period also saw the first complaints about the Chancery.
The Chancery and its growing powers soon came to be resented by Parliament and the nobility; Carne says that it is possible to trace a general "trend of opposition" during the Plantagenet period, particularly from members of the clergy, who were more used to Roman law than equity. From the reign of Richard II, the House of Commons regularly complained about the work of the court, and in 1390 it petitioned the king to pronounce that the court could not act contrary to the common law, nor annul a judgment without due process. At the same time, it asked that no writ could be issued that would compel a man to appear before the court; if it was, the clerk who issued it would lose his job and the lord chancellor would be fined £100. The king gave evasive answers to the requests, and made no decision. The Commons did succeed in making some changes to the court's procedure, however; in 1394 the King assented to their request that victorious defendants in the court have their costs recompensed from the other side, and in 1341 the king, on their application, allowed the lord chancellor to send cases directly to the common law courts, to avoid the common law judges having to waste time travelling. Kerly suggests that many complaints from the Commons came from lawyers of the common law, aggrieved at the Chancery's extended jurisdiction that overlapped with that of the common law. These complaints from the Commons did not prevent the court from successfully functioning; in 1393, for example, it was considered prominent enough that the House of Lords sent two cases there to be dealt with.
According to many academics, the Court of Chancery really began to expand its caseload during the 15th century; Margaret Avery reports a massive increase in cases during the 1440s, while Nicholas Pronay suggests that the real expansion came during Yorkist rule, when the number of cases submitted each year quadrupled. He gives complaints about the perversion of justice in the common law courts, along with growing mercantile and commercial interests, as the main reason for the growth, arguing that this was the period when the Chancery changed from being an administrative body with some judicial functions to "one of the four central courts of the realm ... the growth in the number of is a primary indicator of the changing position of Chancery". This increasing role was assisted by the changing function of the court: until the late 14th century, private parties could not bring cases to the Chancery as they could to the other courts, while by the 15th century the number of private cases had increased to the point where there were many complaints in Parliament. Marsh writes that another reason for the Chancery's growing influence was the remedies available; through orders of specific performance and injunctions, the court could not only rectify previous wrongs but prevent future wrongs from occurring, while the common law courts were limited to awarding damages.