them, regularly filed; the grounds
of demanding relief appear, and the chancellor renders himself in every
instance responsible for the orders he has issued, by thus showing that
they came within his jurisdiction. There are certainly many among the
earlier bills in Chancery, which, according to the statute law and the
great principle that they were determinable in other courts, could not
have been heard; but we are unable to pronounce how far the allegation
usually contained or implied, that justice could not be had elsewhere,
was founded on the real circumstances. A calendar of these early
proceedings (in abstract) is printed in the Introduction to the first
volume of the Calendar of Chancery Proceedings in the Reign of
Elizabeth, and may also be found in Cooper's Public Records, i. 356.

The struggle, however, in behalf of the common law was not at an end. It
is more than probable that the petitions against encroachments of
Chancery, which fill the rolls under Henry IV., Henry V., and in the
minority of Henry VI., emanated from that numerous and jealous body
whose interests as well as prejudices were so deeply affected. Certain
it is that the commons, though now acknowledging an equitable
jurisdiction, or rather one more extensive than is understood by the
word "equitable," in the greatest judicial officer of the crown, did not
cease to remonstrate against his transgression of these boundaries. They
succeeded so far, in 1436, as to obtain a statute (15 Hen. VI. c. 4) in
these words:--"For that divers persons have before this time been
greatly vexed and grieved by writs of _subpoena_, purchased for
matters determinable by the common law of this land, to the great damage
of such persons so vexed, in suspension and impediment of the common law
as aforesaid; Our lord the king doth command that the statutes thereof
made shall be duly observed, according to the form and effect of the
same, and that no writ of _subpoena_ be granted from henceforth until
surety be found to satisfy the party so grieved and vexed for his
damages and expenses, if so be that the matter cannot be made good which
is contained in the bill." It was the intention of the commons, as
appears by the preamble of this statute, and more fully by their
petition in Rot. Parl. (iv. 101), that the matters contained in the bill
on which the _subpoena_ was issued should be not only true in
themselves, but such as could not be determined at common law. But the
kin