ABSTRACT
The six essays collected in this volume have only two things in common: they all concern themselves with the middle years of Henry VIII’s reign, and they have some connectionclose or distant-with the court of Star Chamber. These common features they owe to their origin, for they are, in effect, by-products of a larger enterprise. While investigating the history of the early-Tudor Council in all its aspects and with all its accompanying institutions (a labour of many years on which I am now embarked) I ran across indications here and there that the papers of Star Chamber might contain materials for the telling of stories of a kind which historians of the sixteenth century are only rarely lucky enough to find. For once, the familiar but faintly unreal paths of historical study looked like running through reasonably open country where normally they are hemmed in by a forest impenetrable in its gloomy and permanent obscurity. It proved possible, for a little while, to get away both from the towering figures of political history and from the abstractions of the economic and social historian-possible to learn something about people who would never ordinarily make the headlines but who, living in the sixteenth century, got involved with the law and thus preserved themselves for posterity.
