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g's answer appears rather equivocal. The principle seems nevertheless to have been generally established, about the reign of Henry VI., that the Court of Chancery exercises merely a remedial jurisdiction, not indeed controllable by courts of law, unless possibly in such circumstances as cannot be expected, but bound by its general responsibility to preserve the limits which ancient usage and innumerable precedents have imposed. It was at the end of this reign, and not in that of Richard II., according to the writer so often quoted, that the great enhancement of the chancellor's authority, by bringing feoffments to uses within it, opened a new era in the history of our law. And this the judges brought on themselves by their narrow adherence to technical notions. They now began to discover this; and those of Edward IV., as lord Campbell well says, were "very bold men," having repealed the statute _de donis_ by their own authority in Taltarum's case--a stretch of judicial power beyond any that the Court of Chancery had ventured upon. They were also exceedingly jealous of that court; and in one case, reported in the Year-books (22 Edw. IV. 37), advised a party to disobey an injunction from the Court of Chancery, telling him that, if the chancellor committed him to the Fleet, they would discharge the prisoner by _habeas corpus_. (Lord Campbell, p. 394.) The case seems to have been one where, in modern times, no injunction would have been granted, the courts of law being competent to apply a remedy. NOTE XI. Page 145. This intricate subject has been illustrated, since the first publication of these volumes, in an Essay upon the original Authority of the King's Council, by Sir Francis Palgrave (1834), written with remarkable perspicuity and freedom from diffusiveness. But I do not yet assent to the judgment of the author as to the legality of proceedings before the council, which I have represented as unconstitutional, and which certainly it was the object of parliament to restrain. "It seems," he says, "that in the reign of Henry III. the council was considered as a court of peers within the terms of Magna Charta; and before which, as a court of original jurisdiction, the rights of tenants holding _in capite_ or by barony were to be discussed and decided, and it unquestionably exercised a direct jurisdiction over all the king's subjects" (p. 34). The first volume of Close Rolls, published by Mr. Hardy since Sir F. P
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