mankind seem to have wisely
determined on choosing the most picturesque, so that it is generally
agreed that the origin of the name was the ancient decoration of the
ceiling of the hall with gilded stars.

However this may be, the court of the Star Chamber was an engine of
prodigious power in the hands of Charles's government. It aided them
in two ways. They could punish their enemies, and where these enemies
were wealthy, they could fill up the treasury of the government by
imposing enormous fines upon them. Sometimes the offenses for which
these fines were imposed were not of a nature to deserve such severe
penalties. For instance, there was a law against turning tillage land
into pasturage. Land that is tilled supports men. Land that is
pastured supports cattle and sheep. The former were a burden,
sometimes, to landlords, the latter a means of wealth. Hence there was
then, as there is now, a tendency in England, in certain parts of the
country, for the landed proprietors to change their tillage land to
pasture, and thus drive the peasants away from their homes. There were
laws against this, but a great many persons had done it
notwithstanding. One of these persons was fined four thousand pounds;
an enormous sum. The rest were alarmed, and made _compositions_, as
they were called; that is, they paid at once a certain sum on
condition of not being prosecuted. Thirty thousand pounds were
collected in this way, which was then a very large amount.

There were in those days, as there are now, certain tracts of land in
England called the king's forests, though a large portion of them are
now without trees. The boundaries of these lands had not been very
well defined, but the government now published decrees specifying the
boundaries, and extending them so far as to include, in many cases,
the buildings and improvements of other proprietors. They then
prosecuted these proprietors for having encroached, as they called
it, upon the crown lands, and the Star Chamber assessed very heavy
fines upon them. The people said all this was done merely to get
pretexts to extort money from the nation, to make up for the want of a
Parliament to assess regular taxes; but the government said it was a
just and legal mode of protecting the ancient and legitimate rights of
the king.

In these and similar modes, large sums of money were collected as
fines and penalties for offenses more or less real. In other cases
very severe punishments we