Court of Chancery: Common Law Pleadings, Tower Series

This series contains the pleadings, or formal statements by the parties, in common law suits brought in Chancery.

The variety of suits include:

• actions on recognizances acknowledged in Chancery;
• actions on writs of scire facias, most of which concern the revocation of royal grants and charters and the repeal of letters patent, due to fraud or abuse;
• actions on writs of partition of land among co-parceners (joint heiresses, usually sisters) or for the assignment of dower;
• petitions of right for relief against the Crown, generally in connection with claims to property, usually in the form of a 'traverse', or challenge, that the findings of an inquisition post mortem into lands or goods was defective or unsafe;
• determinations of the liability of a landowner's estate to pay incidents of tenure to the Crown, by taking inquisitions and making assessments.

The records in this series are continued in C 206 C 221 C 222

Other records relating to the common law business of the court of Chancery are in:

Topics

Marriage and divorce

Landed estates

Crime

Although the chancellor was bound to observe the normal procedure of the common law in these cases, and, when issue was joined on a question of fact, submit the action, together with the record, to the court of King's Bench for settlement, a petition to Parliament in 1400-1 in fact reveals that the chancellor sometimes preferred to call the common law judges into Chancery to assist him.