Chancery

Chancery was the Lord Chancellor’s court, which administered ‘equity’: fairness as a body of law, applied where the strict rules of the common law produced injustice. Where the common law asked whether the correct form had been followed, equity asked whether the result was just — so Chancery could take on wrongs the common law could not reach, such as a title that could not be proved because the one document that proved it was in someone else’s hands. Unlike the common law courts, it could compel a defendant to answer the charges on oath. Its records survive at The National Archives in series C.