the house of lords as a court of appeal probate of wills, sexual morality, heresy, non-conformity, misbehaviour in churches and churchyards, and the conduct of the clergy.7 Although in 1533 Henry VIII’s Reformation Parliament had enacted a ban on “appeals sued out of this realm to the see of Rome”, that legislation did nothing to prevent appeals to ecclesiastical courts “within this realm”, and indeed set out in some detail the proper hierarchical course which appellants should pursue, from archdeaconry court upwards.8 In non-legal contexts also there seems to have been growing agreement with the dramatist William Shakespeare, whose late play Henry VIII features an appeal from Catherine of Aragon to Pope Clement V, that the right of appeal was integral to the proper administration of justice. Thus in a 1621 House of Commons debate on reforming the law courts, which focused particularly on the Court of Chancery, it was suggested by Edward Alford (a layman himself, although like many of his fellowMPs a member of one of London’s four legal inns of court) that “For Releife against Erronious Decrees there may be either a Commission of reveiwe, a Writt of Errour devised or some Courte of Appeale erected.”9 It cannot be without significance that this notion of establishing an appeals court with the capacity to review decisions from Chancery and other equity jurisdictions was in the air at precisely the same time that the House of Lords did actually emerge in that capacity (as we shall see). In short, the traditional sharp contrast between civil law and common law with regard to appeals was becoming increasingly blurred in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. So we come to the second apparent point of divergence, that the House of Lords was not a superior court of appeal established as part of the centralising and aggrandizing agenda of an ambitious early modern monarch. England’s parliament was not at first divided into separate assem7 Bilder, Mary S. 2001 pp. 49–62. 8 24 Henry VIII, c. 12. 9 Notestein, Wallace – Relf, Francis H. – Simpson, Hartley (eds.) 1921, iv. 193. 180 Centralization and consolidation
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=