the house of lords as a court of appeal had been too speedily rushed to judgment. But as the legal antiquary Francis Hargrave would later comment, by appointing a committee to consider petitions from Bourchier and other disappointed litigants, the Lords “in effect encouraged the looking to themselves as having an universality of power to relieve...”.12 Indeed theHouse of Lords subsequently went on to hear more than 200 cases during the 1620s; besides appeals, these included original causes and matters already pending in lower courts, both common law and equity.13 No parliament met between 1629 and 1640, the so-called “Eleven Years Tyranny”. But from the summons of the Short Parliament in April 1640, followed by the Long Parliament in November of that year, the Lords’ jurisdiction burgeoned. It necessarily ceased altogether with the abolition of both the House and the monarchy during the republican interlude between 1649 and the return of King Charles II in 1660. But the precise extent of that jurisdiction restored with the monarchy then became a matter of considerable controversy, not least between the two houses of parliament. The effective outcome of two appeals in the fiercely disputed cases of Skinner v East India Company (1667) andShirley v Fagg (1675) was that the Lords abandoned any claim to original jurisdiction, except on impeachments and with regard to their own members, while the Commons accepted the Lords’ sole right to hear appeals from Chancery and other equity courts, alongside their uncontroversial jurisdiction in error from the King’s Bench and other common law courts. Although not without critics and challengers well into the eighteenth century, this ad hoc settlement provided the basis for the post-1689 extension of the Lords’ functions as a court of appeal to cases from the Scottish Court of Session (following the 1707 Act of Union) and Irish equity and error cases (before and after the Declaratory Act of 1720, which nullified the claims of the Irish House of Lords to possess an appellate jurisdiction over judgments from Irish courts).14 12 Hargrave, Francis 1797 p. xxvi. 13 Hart, James S. 1991 pp. 46-7, 55 and chs. 1-5. 14 Ibid., ch. 6. MacLean, A.J 1984 pp. 50–75; Finlay, John 2011 pp. 249–77; Victory, Isolde 1989 pp. 9–30. 182
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