page_title: Court of Chancery
section_title: Competition with the common law
hierarchical_section_title: Court of Chancery / History / Competition with the common law
caption_attribution_description: Thomas Egerton, 1st Viscount Brackley, by unknown artist, given to the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1950. See source website for additional information. This set of images was gathered by User:Dcoetzee from the National Portrait Gallery, London website using a special tool. All images in this batch have an unknown author, but there is strong evidence it was first published before 1923 (based mainly on the NPG's estimated date of the work).
context_page_description: The Court of Chancery was a court of equity in England and Wales that followed a set of loose rules to avoid the 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 was somewhat different: 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, whose decisions it had the jurisdiction to overrule for much of its existence, 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.
context_section_description: The early Elizabethan period featured a dispute between the Court of Chancery and common-law courts over who held pre-eminence. It had been the practice under Henry VI that plaintiffs in the common-law courts could not execute judgments given by the common-law judges if the Lord Chancellor felt their claim was "against conscience". This had been vehemently opposed by the common-law judges, who felt that if the Lord Chancellor had the power to override their decisions, parties to a case would flock to the Court of Chancery. The dispute over the pre-eminence of the Lord Chancellor continued into Elizabeth I's reign, with the judges increasing in strength; the Lord Chancellor was no longer a clergyman whom it was risky to offend, while the judges had grown in stature. Sir Edward Coke cites in his Reports a case at the end of Elizabeth's reign which seems to indicate that the Chancellor's prerogative had been overturned, when the judges (without opposition from the Monarch) allowed a claim to proceed despite the Lord Chancellor's implied jurisdiction. At the same time, the common-law judges ruled that the Chancery had no jurisdiction over matters of freehold.
  The Lord Chancellor of the time, Lord Ellesmere, was not dissuaded, and maintained that he had the jurisdiction to oversee decisions of the common-law courts and matters of freehold. In 1614, he heard the case of Courtney v. Glanvil, dictating that Glanvil should be imprisoned for deceit; this was over-ruled by Sir Edward Coke in the Court of King's Bench, who demanded that Glanvil be released and issued a writ of habeas corpus. Two years later, the Earl of Oxford's Case came before Ellesmere, who issued a judgment that directly contradicted English law based on the "Law of God". Coke and the other judges over-ruled this judgment while Ellesmere was ill, taking the case as an opportunity to completely overthrow the Lord Chancellor's jurisdiction. Ellesmere appealed to the Monarch, who referred the matter to the Attorney General for the Prince of Wales and Francis Bacon, the Attorney General for England and Wales. Both recommended a judgment in Ellesmere's favour, which the Monarch made, saying:
  as mercy and justice be the true supports of our Royal Throne; and it properly belongeth to our princely office to take care and provide that our subjects have equal and indifferent justice ministered to them; and that when their case deserveth to be relieved in course of equity by suit in our Court of Chancery, they should not be abandoned and exposed to perish under the rigor and extremity of our laws, we ... do approve, ratifie and confirm, as well the practice of our Court of Chancery.
  Coke's challenge to the Chancery is seen by academic Duncan Kerly as helping him lose his position as a judge, and until its dissolution the Court of Chancery could overrule judgments issued in the common-law courts. This was not the end of the dispute, however; in his Institutes of the Lawes of England, Coke suggested that the Monarch's decree was unlawful, and his contemporary David Jenkins wrote in Eight Centuries of Reports that "the excess of Jurisdiction in Chancery, in examining Judgments at Common Law" was one of the largest abuses of the law. In the 17th century Robert Atkyns attempted to renew this controversy in his book An Enquiry into the Jurisdiction of the Chancery in Causes of Equity, but without any tangible result. Even so, future Lord Chancellors were more cautious; when Francis Bacon succeeded Ellesmere, he made sure to prevent the misuse of injunctions. Horwitz writes that this was not just limited to Bacon, and that "after the dramatic confrontations between Lord Chief Justice Coke and Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, chancellors took care to circumscribe the Court's corrective jurisdiction and to focus more narrowly on territories they had staked out as peculiarly their own".
caption: Lord Ellesmere, who worked to maintain the Chancery's ability to override the common law courts as Lord Chancellor
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