ch followed. In the reign of Henry the
Seventh it took legal and statutory form in the shape of the Court of Star
Chamber, and its powers are still exercised in our own day by the Judicial
Committee of the Privy Council. But the same duty of the Crown to do
justice where its courts fell short of giving due redress for wrong
expressed itself in the jurisdiction of the Chancellor. This great officer
of State, who had perhaps originally acted only as President of the Council
when discharging its judicial functions, acquired at a very early date an
independent judicial position of the same nature. It is by remembering this
origin of the Court of Chancery that we understand the nature of the powers
it gradually acquired. All grievances of the subject, especially those
which sprang from the misconduct of government officials or of powerful
oppressors, fell within its cognizance as they fell within that of the
Royal Council, and to these were added disputes respecting the wardship of
infants, dower, rent-charges, or tithes. Its equitable jurisdiction sprang
from the defective nature and the technical and unbending rules of the
common law. As the Council had given redress in cases where law became
injustice, so the Court of Chancery interfered without regard to the rules
of procedure adopted by the common law courts on the petition of a party
for whose grievance the common law provided no adequate remedy. An
analogous extension of his powers enabled the Chancellor to afford relief
in cases of fraud, accident, or abuse of trust, and this side of his
jurisdiction was largely extended at a later time by the results of
legislation on the tenure of land by ecclesiastical bodies. The separate
powers of the Chancellor, whatever was the original date at which they were
first exercised, seem to have been thoroughly established under Edward the
First.

[Sidenote: Law and the Baronage]

What reconciled the nation to the exercise of powers such as these by the
Crown and its council was the need which was still to exist for centuries
of an effective means of bringing the baronage within the reach of the law.
Constitutionally the position of the English nobles had now become
established. A king could no longer make laws or levy taxes or even make
war without their assent. The nation reposed in them an unwavering trust,
for they were no longer the brutal foreigners from whose violence the
strong hand of a Norman ruler had been needed to pro