The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

Though the new laws terrified, they were kept as a threat which was usually faithful. In England, unlike the rest of Europe, torture was not used as an ordinary part of the legal process. Under the first Tudors, no judges were removed, and very few juries punished. Even packed juries sometimes acquitted. Yet people remembered the fear. Edward VI's councillors denounced 'the cruel and bloody laws' of his father; 'Dracon's laws . . . written in blood'. Bishop Gardiner later claimed that the oaths he had taken under Henry and Edward were 'Herod's oaths'. Henry saw himself rather as Justinian, the lawgiver. Yet the laws of England had never been codified by kings.
The law of England was, and is, composed of three great elements: common law, equity and statue. The common law was created by the custom of the people and the decisions of judges: it was unwritten, enshrined in the collective memory of the common lawyers; it was immemorial, traceable to no original at of foundation, and proved by long experience; it was, so common lawyers claimed, constantly reinterpreted, but always the same. The central common law courts - King's Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer - sat at Westminster, prototypes for the same courts in Dublin. Tudor common lawyers, defending their law against the competing, and foreign, claims of civil (based on Roman law) and canon (Church) law, thought it not merely the best law in the world, but the oldest. Yet if it was old, it had also failed to adapt: its procedures were antediluvian, its processes in tatters. The work of the King's Bench had been in decline since the mid fifteenth century. Litigants were abandoning the common law to seek justice in the Chancellor's courts of Chancery and Star Chamber, hoping that they would find swifter process and immunity from the corruption of local sessions and assizes. Equity jurisdiction had developed centuries before when, if the courts of common law had failed to give redress, litigants would petition the king, who set up the Court of Chancery to hear them. The Chancellor became keeper of the royal conscience. The rules applied by Chancery became law, and where there was variance between common law and equity, equity prevailed.