Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

The Presentation of Cases in Medieval Chancery Bills 21
by making his legitimate interim seisin clear, and by directing the complaint
properly against an intruder claiming a right to the holding. 21 In the coparcenery
case, failure to mention the petitioner's curtesy right, omission of a number of
coparceners, and especially not specifying a common law bar that existed due
to the undivided nature of the coparcenery, were clearly sufficient to induce the
court to dismiss the original bill. 22
The final example concerns a case involving the seizure and detention of
goods, and two main errors appear to have caused the necessity of redrafting
the bill before it entered the court. One was the implicit admission of the
respondent's premises for seizure, and the other the failure to mention that the
petitioner lacked common law remedy because of the power of the respondent. 23
It may be concluded that despite the less formal nature of process by bill in
comparison with common law procedure, the court of chancery did not offer
an opportunity for success upon slipshod or uninformed petitions - bills could
and did fail. That a complaint be cast according to the established canon of
chancery bill form was clearly an initial requirement. Further, the striving after
precise and forceful presentation demonstrated in the bills discussed here was
a response to a demand made by the court in its refusal either to entertain, or
to allow significant modification of, substantively inaccurate presentations. It
should be remembered that the 200 bills from which these examples are drawn
all display a memorandum of surety, added in the chancery, which states that it
is the matter as specified in that particular bill - 'materiam in hac supplicacione
specificatani 1 - that the petitioner must prove to be true, not a significant
variant of that matter which might finally be made clear after a number of
significant in-court changes to the case. Just as a common law case would
fail if an inappropriate writ were purchased, a chancery petition would not
succeed if the bill that was drawn to initiate process was faulty in substance.
Composers, scribes and assessors worked hard to ensure correctness, in order
to give the petitioner his best chance of success, and this work is seen most clearly
in these bill-pairs.
21 Stowell, Stowellv. Colcok, Sturmyn (C 1/9 nos.!39a, 139b).
22 Furse v. Strepe, Lechelond ( C 1/9 nos.3a, 3b).
23 Somerset v. Sharp (C 1/9 nos.!24b, 124a).