wilfrid prest 1580s errors in a judgment of the court of King’s Bench could only be corrected by parliament; that remedy was available only when “Parliament was in session; it was extremely expensive; and it was exceptionally rare.”6 A still more serious deficiency of the error process was that it applied only to judgments enrolled in the three ancient common law courts. No such remedy existed to cater for litigants unwilling to accept the outcome of their suit in one of the more recently established and increasingly well-patronised conciliar, English-bill, equity or prerogative jurisdictions, especially the Court of Chancery, but also the Court of Requests, the Court of Wards, and the Court of Star Chamber, together with some provincial jurisdictions, such as the Court of Duchy Chamber, the Council of the North and the Council in the Marches of Wales. These tribunals provided a mode of dispute resolution procedurally derived in part from Roman or civil law, in which suits were initiated not by Latin writ and law-French pleadings, but by petition or bill written inEnglish. Considering the overall equity of a case, rather than being bound by the rigid forms of the common law, they were relatively more accommodating to litigants’ needs, and hence increasingly popular. Nevertheless, the American legal historian Mary S. Bilder has shown that in later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England both the word itself and the concept of “appeal”, in the sense of a review or reconsideration of a previous decision by a higher authority, enjoyed wide currency across various contexts, legal and non-legal. In the first place, besides the relatively new English-bill courts, there had long existed various jurisdictions staffed by civil lawyers and operated according to principles derived from Roman law, in which the appeal was fully accepted among the procedural options available to litigants. Besides the more specialised high court of Admiralty, which dealt with mercantile and maritime matters, and the chancellor’s or vice-chancellor’s courts of Oxford and Cambridge universities, these included the very extensive national hierarchy of ecclesiastical courts, which handled a surprisingly capacious grab-bag of matters relating to matrimony, defamation, the 6 Baker, John H 2003 p. 404. 179
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