Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/529

 1922 STAR CHAMBER UNDER THE TUDOR8 521 century after that date it does not seem to have occurred to any one to see any connexion between 3 Henry VII, c. 1, and the star chamber. The first point to explain is how the words ' camera stellata ' and ' star chamber ' came to appear on the margin of the roll of parliament, whence they have got into the printed Statutes of the Realm. 1 The parliament rolls are the original authority for parliamentary statutes down to Henry VH's reign. They contain proceedings as well as enacted petitions, and down to 8 Edward IV the statutes are extracted from the parliament rolls and enrolled in a separate collection of statute rolls, of which a transcript was sent to the exchequer and is cited as Lib. Scacc. 2 Gradually during the Tudor period the proceedings dropped out of the parliament roll, which became a mere statute roll, while the proceedings were entered in journals, from 1510 of the lords, and from 1547 of the commons. The original statute roll ceased to be made up, and none is known after 1468. There are, however, two contemporary manuscripts which look like transcripts from a statute roll, one, Petyt MS. (Inner Temple), coming down as far as 1487, and the other, Bodleian MS. 3701 (Hatton 110), continuing nearly to the end of 11 Henry VII, 3 and there is also the Lib. Scacc. None of these, however, nor Caxton's contem- porary print, has any reference in text or in margin to star 1 Earlier editions of the statutes, apart from the king's printer's contemporary and official publication of the statutes of each successive parliament, were private ventures by editors who reprinted previous editions, generally omitting statutes which had expired and others which the editors regarded as private acts ; but they did not go to the manuscripts either of the rolls or the original acts for their text. Hence the title of 3 Henry VII, c. 1, is varied at will by different editors in their various editions. The Statutes of the Realm take the text of 3 Henry VII, c. 1, from the roll and also the marginal headings without noting that the latter are in later hands than the text ; the editors also modernized ' aucthority ' into ' authority ' in the marginal heading, but not ' auctorite ' in the text. 2 In the fifteenth century it was referred to the judges to determine which of the proceedings of parliament were statutes and should therefore be proclaimed, and which were not ; all, however, were to be enrolled in chancery, as was the custom (Nicolas, iii. 22). A facsimile of a page of the Lib. Scacc. is given in the Statutes of the Realm (ii. 477), and another of a membrane of the Statute Roll is given at p. 1 of the same volume. Both are reproduced in Appendix to Record Comm. Reports, 1800-19. 3 Statutes of the Realm, ii. 499, 524 ; Record Commission, Proceedings, 1800-12, p. 179. The Hatton MS. was made for the Serjeant Piggott who occurs in Wolsey's well-known letter quoted below, p. 528. It ends in the middle of a sentence from 11 Henry VII, c. 27. It resembles the Petyt MS., but occasionally varies the order of the acts, e. g. c. 11 of 3 Henry VII is c. 15 in the Piggott MS., which also gives an expired act omitted in Petyt. Both are in French to the end of 3 Henry VII. With 4 Henry VII the Piggott MS. begins to be in English and also gives chapter headings as in the printed acts, from which it was probably transcribed after 3 Henry VII. The Lib. Scacc. is in English from 1487. The inference is that down to the end of 3 Henry VII there was a statute roll made up in French, though the manuscript does not exist after 1483, and that after 1487 the king's printer's text took the place of the Statute Roll.