Court of Star-Chamber. (Archaeologia, xxv. 345.) It
is difficult to say whether this fell within the modern rules of equity,
but the general principle is evidently the same.

Another petition is from the commonalty of Suffolk to the council,
complaining of false indictments and presentments in courts-leet. It is
answered--"Si quis sequi voluerit adversus falsos indicatores et
procuratores de falsis indictamentis, sequatur in Cancell. et habebit
remedium consequens." Several other entries in this list are
illustrative of the jurisdiction appertaining, in fact at least, to the
council and the chancellor; and being of so early a reign form a
valuable accession to those which later records have furnished to Sir
Matthew Hale and others.

The Court of Chancery began to decide causes as a court of equity,
according to Mr. Hardy, in the reign of Edward III., probably about 22
Edw. III. (Introduction to Close Rolls, p. 28.) Lord Campbell would
carry this jurisdiction higher, and the instances already mentioned may
be sufficient just to prove that it had begun to exist. It certainly
seems no unnatural supposition that the great principle of doing
justice, by which the council and the chancellor professed to guide
their exercise of judicature, may have led them to grant relief in some
of those numerous instances where the common law was defective or its
rules too technical and unbending. But, as has been observed, the actual
entries, as far as quoted, do not afford many precedents of equity. Mr.
Hardy, indeed, suggests (p. 25) that the _Curia Regis_ in the Norman
period proceeded on equitable principles; and that this led to the
removal of plaints into it from the county-court. This is, perhaps, not
what we should naturally presume. The subtle and technical spirit of the
Norman lawyers is precisely that which leads, in legal procedure, to
definite and unbending rules; while in the lower courts, where
Anglo-Saxon thanes had ever judged by the broad rules of justice,
according to the circumstances of the case, rather than a strict line of
law which did not yet exist, we might expect to find all the uncertainty
and inconsistency which belongs to a system of equity, until, as in
England, it has acquired by length of time the uniformity of law, but
none at least of the technicality so characteristic of our Norman common
law, and by which the great object of judicial proceedings was so
continually defeated. This, therefore, does not se