With the court of star-chamber perished that of the high-commission, a younger birth of tyranny, but perhaps even more hateful, from the peculiar irritation of the times. It had stretched its authority beyond the tenor of the act of Elizabeth, whereby it had been created, and which limits its competence to the correction of ecclesiastical offences according to the known boundaries of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, assuming a right, not only to imprison, but to fine the laity, which was generally reckoned illegal.[169] The statute repealing that of Elizabeth, under which the high-commission existed, proceeds to take away from the ecclesiastical courts all power of inflicting temporal penalties, in terms so large, and doubtless not inadvertently employed, as to render their jurisdiction nugatory. This part of the act was repealed after the restoration; and like the other measures of that time, with little care to prevent the recurrence of those abuses which had provoked its enactments.[170]
A single clause in the act that abolished the star-chamber was sufficient to annihilate the arbitrary jurisdiction of several other irregular tribunals, grown out of the despotic temper of the Tudor dynasty:--the court of the president and council of the North, long obnoxious to the common lawyers, and lately the sphere of Strafford's tyrannical arrogance;[171] the court of the president and council of Wales and the Welsh marches, which had pretended, as before mentioned, to a jurisdiction over the adjacent counties of Salop, Worcester, Hereford, and Gloucester; with those of the duchy of Lancaster and county palatine of Chester. These, under various pretexts, had usurped so extensive a cognisance as to deprive one-third of England of the privileges of the common law. The jurisdiction, however, of the two latter courts in matters touching the king's private estate has not been taken away by the statute. Another act afforded remedy for some abuses in the stannary-courts of Cornwall and Devon.[172] Others retrenched the vexatious prerogative of purveyance, and took away that of compulsory knighthood.[173] And one of greater importance put an end to a fruitful source of oppression and complaint, by determining for ever the extent of royal forests, according to their boundaries in the twentieth year of James, annulling all the preambulations and inquests by which they had subsequently been enlarged.[174]