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THE ACTIVITY OF THE COUNCIL IN THE MARCHES UNDER THE EARLY STUARTS1 THE prerogative courts and councils of London, York, Ludlow, and Dublin have long been regarded as especially characteristic of Stuart government; and in our own day the term 'Star Chamber justice' is still used to blacken tyrannical law-courts.2 Even so, we still do not know at all precisely what these institutions actually did; for, with the exception of Mr. H. E. I. Phillips's important article on the Star Chamber, there has been no adequate published description of their work in the Stuart period.3 Part of this gap in our knowledge can be filled by an analysis of the Council in the Marches of Wales. Several questions require an answer. How active was the Council in this period? Was it more or less vigorous than before? In what parts of Wales and the Marches was its authority most felt? What sort of cases did it hear? How efficiently and how equitably was it dealing with them? And how did it compare with similar courts? Not all these questions can be confidently answered. But the material for the Council's history in the years 1617-37 is so much more abundant than for any earlier period in its life that each of them may at least be considered. However, before we can go any further we must describe and analyse the various kinds of statistical evidence that are available. Unless this is done, tedious though it must be, mistakes will easily 1 My grateful thanks are due to the Leverhulme Trustees, whose generous grant enabled me to examine the relevant documents in English repositories, and to Dr. Moses Tyson, librarian of the University of Manchester, who very kindly obtained at my request microfilms of a section of the Ellesmere MSS. at the Huntington Library, San Marino. Quotations from these manuscripts are made by kind permission of the Huntington Library. I also wish to thank Mr. J. E. Blackwell, who provided me with the services of a calculating machine, and Mr. D. H. Pennington, who made a number of helpful suggestions. See for example The Daily Mail, 24 December 1959, p. 1. Mr. Robert Edwards, a British M.P., on being forbidden by the Spanish police to attend the trial of seventeen strikers, asked: 'Is this the Star Chamber?' The reply of the police is not recorded. 8 H. E. I. Phillips, 'The last years of the Court of Star Chamber' in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (hereafter T.R.H.S.). 4th series, XXI (1939). 103-31. The present writer's Council in the Marches of Wales under Elizabeth I (Cardiff, 1958) largely omitted the problems discussed in this article, since the relevant material for the sixteenth century no longer exists. C. A. J. Skeel, in The Council in the Marches of Wales (London, 1904) and 'Social and Economic Conditions in Wales and the Marches in the early seventeenth century' in Transactions of the Society of Cymmrodorion (hereafter Trans. Soc. Cymm.), 1916-17, pp. 119-44, did not, for reasons which will shortly appear, deal adequately with the Council's business. Rachel Reid. The King's Council in the North (London, 1921), did not find enough material to allow an analysis of that council's activity. There are two valuable unpublished London M.A. Theses: Elfreda Skelton (now Lady Neale), 'The Court of Star Chamber in the reign of Elizabeth' (1931), and W. J. B. Allsebrook, 'The Court of Requests in the reign of Elizabeth' (1936). But naturally neither of these has much to say about the Stuart period. There is very little on prerogative jurisdiction in Ireland. H. Kearney, Strafford in Ireland (Manchester, 1959). ch. vni, is illuminating on Castle Chamber; but the only general survey is H. Wood, 'The Court of Castle Chamber' in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. XXXII, ser. C. no. 10, p. 152.