Court of Star Chamber: Proceedings, Elizabeth I

STAC 5

c 1558-c 1603

This series contains legal proceedings heard before the Court of Star Chamber in the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603).

Frequent allegations are of perversion of justice, abuse of legal procedure, frivolous litigation, false imprisonment, or crimes unpunished, often claiming corruption, misfeasance or malfeasance by officials. Such cases might involve corrupt jury verdicts or perjury by deponents at the county assizes, improper procedure, and falsification of records either by officials or by the interested parties, including forgery of bonds, wills, and deeds. Many of these causes illustrate litigants' concurent or consecutive use of the many courts available, from the common law courts of King's Bench, Common Pleas or Exchequer, or the Palatinate courts, to the eqiity and conciliar courts such as Chancery, Requests, the Council in the Marches of Wales, and the Council in the North. Other frequent offences include allegations of libel, murder, abduction (under the Abduction Act of 4 & 5 Ph. & M. c. 8), unlawful hunting, assault, and riot. Riot - by more than three people acting together - was often alleged in order to bring a cause into the jurisdiction of the Star Chamber. Disputes arising from enclosures are ubiquitous. Religious differences are also represented. There are some causes alleging witchcraft, and many about fraudulent elections and illegal hunting.

Official plaintiffs were the Attorney General and the Queen's Almoner. The Attorney General started a cause with an information, not a bill, but could also intervene in a cause brought by others. There are several wide-ranging investigations by Edward Coke, such as those into the activities of saltpetre men, and of merchants buying up rye in the hungry 1590s, and into statutory offences such as the decay of tillage and habitations. The Queen's Almoner investigated the non-payment of money owed to the Crown from the estates of suicides, or of those who died in accidents (deodands).

The series contains over 35,000 proceedings (although the number of causes is about half that, as the constituent documents of a suit were often filed separately, or have perhaps just ended up separated). A project started in 2015 pulled together records scattered within the main series STAC 5 and the supplementary series STAC 7, by giving a unique cause number to all the document references for a single cause. Using this number as a search term wlll bring together all related parts of a cause in STAC 5 or STAC 7. Cross-overs from earlier and later reigns have been identified where possible, but others may exist. Elizabethan records found misplaced in STAC 2-STAC 4 have been left there, but cross-referenced.

Each reference in STAC 5 and STAC 7 is now described as follows: 

• Short title, based on the surnames of a plaintiff and a defendant (usually the first-named persons), in modernised spelling, using standardised surnames.
• Cause number, comprising SCEL and a number. These do not appear on the records themselves but were created to make it easier to virtually reassemble separate parts of a suit. The numbers are not meaningful.
• Suits with case references starting with SCUC lack a bill (UC for Unknown Cause); such bills may be among the as yet undescribed miscellanea in STAC 10.
• Document type (e.g. bill, answer, replication, rejoinder, commissions to local gentry to question deponents, interrogatories, depositions; cases brought by the Attorney General start with an information).
• Names of plaintiffs and defendants, in 16th century spellings: those identified as defendants may well be deponents, not defendants.
• Regnal year is generic rather than completely accurate: many bills were not dated, and dating as given could be based on the return date of answer, or the date of a commission or deposition. Sometimes it appears that depositions were taken earlier than a bill was submitted. This may be illusory.
• County and subject matter are included where known.

The descriptions are based on the 4-volume catalogue created in the 1740s, when the Treasury funded the vast undertaking of listing dirty and disarranged documents by plainitffs, defendants, document types and regnal year. The cataloguers did this by assembling bundles of 40 documents at a time, in letter sequences based on the surname of the first plainitff named in the bill, or found in later documents. Given their constraints of disarray, filth, and Treasury pressure, they did an excellent job, but were not able to reunite separated documents in the same cause or to indicate subject. These four volumes were transcribed by Helen Good in the 2010s and published online in her Elizabethan Star Chamber Project: see the WAALT website. Her very kind permission allowed TNA to reuse her work as the basis for the new cataloguing. Also used were the 20th century catalogue of STAC 7, and the indexes to STAC 5 created in the 1960s and published in 4 volumes as PRO Supplementary Lists and Indexes IV. All this data was worked over intensively in spreadsheet in her own time by Amanda Bevan of TNA. Separated references were brought together by the creation of short titles based on modernised spellings. Some pleadings still remain unattached to any bill. Quite often further information in its text allows an unattached document to be linked to an identified cause.

Subject matter has been provided here for just over half the references, from a combination of published material (undertaken in 2020/21, during lockdown) and by checking of boxes of documents by Bevan on return to TNA. Subject matter was described from one or more documents examined for each cause, and extended to the other references in that cause. Pulished works used, with permission, to provide subject matter include:

• Les reportes del cases in Camera Stellata, 1593 to 1609 from the original ms. of John Hawarde, edited by W Paley Baildon, 1894; the reporter often misheard names spoken in court.
• Star Chamber reports : BL Harley MS 2143, ed K J Kesselring, 2018: added with her kind permission.
• A Catalogue of Star Chamber Proceedings relating to Wales, Ifan ab Owen Edwards, 1929: used with the kind permission of the Board of Celtic Studies, with thanks to the work of Katie Bridger.
• Helen Good, Elizabethan Star Chamber Project;
• John Guy, The Court of Star Chamber and its records to the reign of Elizabeth I, 1985;
• Louis Knafla, Kent at Law, 1602: Volume III: Star Chamber2013. Cross references are given to his full texts;
• Cora L Schofield, A Study of the Court of Star Chamber, 1900;
• Elfreda Skelton, 'The court of star chamber in the reign of Queen Elizabeth', University of London M.A. thesis, 1931.

• More recent books, articles and PhD theses using STAC 5 and STAC 7 were searched online for references starting STAC 5, STAC 7, Sta.CHa. Eliz, etc: these many works have not been acknowledged individually. Nor has the very valuable information provided by the biographies and constituency entries of the History of Parliament: Parliaments 1558-1503.

We welcome any contributions of subject data, corrections and additions by users of these records.

A project ran between 2015 and 2025 to improve the cataloguing of these records. The National Archives is grateful to Helen Good, Krista Kesselring, Louis Knafla, the List and Index Society and the Board of Celtic Studies for allowing us to make use of their work to enhance the catalogue.

and

STAC 7

STAC 8

Other proceedings of the Court of Star Chamber for the reign of Elizabeth I will be found in:

STAC 4

Public Record(s)

English and Latin

982 bundle(s)

Open

Topics

Litigation

Public disorder

Trade and commerce

Religions

Democracy

Hunting

Wills and probate

Crime

Witchcraft

Farming

By the early years of the reign of Elizabeth I, Star Chamber had become almost exclusively a criminal court. Records and procedure in Star Chamber under Elizabeth were essentially those that had operated since the latter years of Henry VIII.