ABSTRACT
The House of Lords faced a multitude of responsibilities at the opening of the Long Parliament. Resolving the crisis engendered by the administration of Crown programmes and policies in the 1630s no doubt seemed (and clearly was) of paramount importance and, given the highly charged atmosphere of political reform which characterized the first session, the Lords could have been expected to devote considerable time and attention to that task. But that was not the only crisis at hand. The prospect of a new Parliament had generated interest from all quarters, and, predictably, the Lords also came under heavy pressure in the opening weeks of the session to return to the continuing (and by now increasingly serious) problems which plagued conventional legal proceedings. The passage of time had done little to rectify the inherent defects of the English legal system. Indeed, in the natural course of things-given consistently high levels of litigation in the central courts-they had grown steadily worse. Chronic congestion and delay, procedural complexity, jurisdictional confusion and conflict and escalating costs remained the bywords of contemporary litigation just as they had in the 1620s. Litigants could still complain that there was no effective appellate recourse from the courts of equity, nor redress for the multiplicity of special problems (and corrupt practices) indigenous to particular courts. These defects had continued to generate widespread public discontent during the 1630s and that discontent ultimately found expression, as it had in the 1620s, in scores of petitions to the House of Lords.
