The Medieval English Court of Chancery

Abstract

The medieval English Court of Chancery is not a well-known institution. Its Victorian great-granddaughter—if to posit such a relationship does the antecedent justice—has a far broader public for its much darker persona, thanks to Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Even Chancery's Jacobean descendant looms larger in the historical memory than does its medieval forebear, if only for the celebrated battle between Chancellor Ellesmere and Coke, CJ. Perhaps with the brief tenure of St. Thomas More, brought into our own popular culture by playwright Robert Bolt and actor Paul Scofield, the early Chancery emerges for a moment, although the court under More was overshadowed by that chancellor's more difficult trials. In fact, the Chancery as a court has been subsumed in a multitude of studies on the Chancery as an administrative office. It appears in essays on government, councils and parliaments, writing offices and administrative centers. Yet the court that grew around the chancellor was not the sum, or even just a part, of his activity as the leading administrator of the realm. Still, with a few exceptions, the medieval Court of Chancery has never been afforded the same careful and discrete treatment its Elizabethan successor has received. The older court remains a footnote to administrative history, something just on the far side of the light cast by St German and Tudor records.