The Conciliar Courts

This chapter examines the courts associated with the king’s council and the residuary prerogative jurisdiction of the Crown. Such courts were not supposed to meddle with the law of property, or with matters of life and death, since they did not follow the ‘due process’ required by Magna Carta and its progeny, but they nevertheless developed extensive jurisdictions alongside the courts of law. Their procedure was close to that of the Chancery. The principal conciliar courts were the Star Chamber and the Court of Requests, at Westminster, but there were provincial counterparts in the Marches of Wales and in the North. The extraterritorial jurisdictions of the admiralty and the constable and marshal were similarly derived from the royal prerogative and operated outside the common law. The King’s Bench watched all these jurisdictions carefully and checked excesses by means of prohibition and habeas corpus.