and coram rege ubicumque fuerit in Anglid. everything respecting law and justice, both The council however of which we speak, civil and criminal, that was not declared by in distinction from that of the great council any known rule, or not distributed among or Parliament, and the great council of the some of the established judicial departments. king next under it, and which in effect ap It was, however, in the king's own coun proached very near to what was afterwards cil, or that branch of it to which we have called the privy council, consisted of the referred, consisting of his principal officers treasurer, chancellor, justices, barons, the of state and resembling the modern privy keeper of the rolls, the master in chancery, council, that criminal prosecutions were the chamberlains of the exchequer, justices conducted, and which possessed supreme in eyre, justices assigned, justices in Wales, jurisdiction over all matters of a criminal the king's sergeants, the secretaries of state, nature under the degree of capital, for which clerk of the privy seal, clerk of the ward the law contained no appropriate provision. robe, and such other persons as the king This council used to sit in different cham chose to advise with.1 bers in the palace, sometimes en la chambre The nature and constitution of the former de peincte, again en la chambre blanche or en of these two councils is less known to us la chambre de marcolf, and probably even than that of the latter, but it may be dis as early as the reign of Edward III. en la cerned that both of them kept up a close chambre des etoiles1; to which place of their correspondence with the Parliament, so that sitting the general return of certain writs in causes were adjourned from the latter into this reign, coram nobis in camerd, referred. either of the councils, and were there heard Sir Francis Palgrave says that it " held its and finally determined. The method of sittings in the 'starred chamber,'2 an apart address to both was by petition, and the ment situated in the outermost quadrangle subjects of their jurisdiction comprised of the palace, next to the banks of the river, and consequently easily accessible to the 1 Blaekstone (Book I., chap. 5), in speaking of one of suitors, and which at length was perma the councils belonging to the king, viz., his judges of the nently appropriated to the use of the council. courts of law, for law matters (citing from this designation Coke, I. Just, 11o), expresses his view that when the king's The ' lords sitting in the Sterre chamber ' council is mentioned in reference to a subject of a legal became a phrase, . . . and we can hardly nature then is understood his council for matters of law, doubt that this circumstance contributed to namely, his judges; and he cites St. 16, Ric. II., c. 5, whereby it was made a high offense to import into Eng assist the council in maintaining their land any papal bulles or other processes from Rome, and authority." it was enacted that the offenders should be attached by No opposition seems to have been their bodies, and brought before the king and his council to answer for such offense, and says : " I lere by the ex made to the exercise of this tremendous pression of the king's council were understood the king's judges of his courts of justice, the subject-matter being legal, this being the general way of interpreting the word council." (Citing Coke, 3 Just. 125.) But l.d. Ch. J. Coleridge dissents from this view. He savs the passage referred to in 3 Just, is no authority for Blackstone's interpretation of the word "council" in the Stat, of Richard. It is a comment on the statute of prae munire, 27 Edw. III. St. I, c. I, where the word seems used in the same sense as in the first mentioned statute, and in which Coke states that it cannot mean the judges. "The truth is," says Ld. Coleridge, '• I believe that the council here mentioned was a court of very extensive equit able jurisdiction both in civil and criminal matters, the fountain from which in process of time the courts of Chancery and Star Chamber were derived."
1 Hudson says: "And so I doubt not but Camera Stellata . . is most aptly named; not because the Star Chamber is so adorned with stars gilded, as some would have it, for surely the chamber is so adorned, because it is the seal " (seat) " of that court, . . . and it was so fitly called because the stars have no light but what is cast upon them by the sun, by reflection being his representa tive body, and as his royal majesty himself was pleased to say, ' in short that the king was the sun and the judges the stars.'" 2 The favorite derivation of the name is from the "starra " or Jewish charters anciently kept there. The Jews were expelled from England in the time of Edward I., and the meaning of the woftl "starra" might naturally be forgotten though the name survived.
