7. Labourers, legal aid and the limits of popular legalism in Star Chamber*

Hillary Taylor

In recent decades, historians have done much to enhance our understanding of the nature and extent of popular participation in the early modern English legal system. Common people contributed to the business of a range of courts, thereby helping to bring about a period of litigiousness from the second half of the sixteenth century that was – and remains – unique in English history.¹ While members of the labouring population were most likely to initiate suits outside of Westminster, they were not wholly absent from the central courts. Examinations of Exchequer have revealed customary tenants’ recourse to litigation, while studies of Requests have demonstrated the degree to which less well-off litigants used the court in their efforts to resolve disputes about a variety of issues.² Taken in aggregate, this work suggests that the law was not the mystified preserve of the ruling gentry and professional groups; rather, it was harnessed by a broad swathe of the population for their own purposes.

By contrast, Star Chamber presents fewer opportunities for exploring labouring people’s participation in the legal system – at least as the instigators of suits. It lent itself, in Thomas Barnes’s estimation, to ‘gentlemen’s business, first and foremost’.³ While members of the labouring population did find themselves involved in Star Chamber litigation, it was more often as defendants. Nonetheless, historians have found ways around these issues. Where labouring defendants are concerned, they have made good use of suits related to one substantial portion of Star Chamber business: the prosecution of riot in general, and enclosure riot in particular. Among other things, they have used its records to analyse the politics surrounding access to and assaults on common rights; the ways in which those who were liable to prosecution sought to manipulate ambiguities in the law to their own advantage; and the social depth of ‘law-mindedness’ in the period.⁴ Others have suggested that the court’s significance should be assessed in relation to the opportunities that it provided for common people to participate in the legal process as witnesses. In their depositions, Steve Hindle has suggested that members of the labouring population evinced an ‘almost compulsive tendency to think in terms of “rights”’.⁵ Labouring people’s involvement in Star Chamber litigation therefore not only facilitated the expression of popular – if not national – legal and political cultures, but also played a constitutive role in their formation over the course of the early modern period.

This chapter advances a more pessimistic vision of popular legalism and plebian experiences of the legal process by exploring another genre of suits that comprised a fair amount of Star Chamber’s business: namely, those featuring allegations related to the perversion of justice.⁶ It is something of a companion piece to a recent article of mine, which examined the forms of instrumentalization and coercion that could result in labouring people’s testifying on behalf of their litigious superiors – typically, though not exclusively, in property disputes that were of no immediate concern to them – and the potential consequences of their doing so. Among other things, these included their being sued in Star Chamber for perjury as a result of giving ‘false’ evidence under oath in previous suits.⁷ The volume of suits involving allegations of subornation and/or perjury is sizeable, particularly from the Elizabethan period, after the latter became a statutory offence in 1563 and as the overall volume of litigation increased. Contemporary observers of Star Chamber remarked on this phenomenon.⁸ For the most part, these records do not lend themselves to quantitative analysis.⁹ To be sure, recurring tropes do emerge from sustained engagement with this material. But it is not reduceable to such factors because individual suits varied considerably in their level of detail and complexity.¹⁰ And while a portion of this litigation was almost certainly generated by ‘vexatious’ in-fighting between individuals of roughly comparable socio-economic position, it remains the case that labouring people not infrequently became ensnared in it.¹¹ Even where their involvement did not result in formal prosecution or punishment by the court, it could – at the minimum – occasion annoyance.¹²

At their best, Star Chamber subornation and perjury suits – as well as those involving allegations of legal corruption more broadly – shed light on alternative aspects of labouring people’s participation in both civil and criminal litigation prior to the court’s abolition in 1641. They illuminate the multiple and sometimes contradictory ways in which members of the labouring population individually or collectively thought about the prospect of engaging in the legal process, as well as their knowledge of the technicalities of legal procedure. They also offer a salutary reminder that litigation did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, the processes that resulted in labouring people’s participation – whether as witnesses or as defendants – were informed by socio-economic factors and relationships that preceded their appearance ‘in court’. Upon arrival, common people’s experiences could be further shaped by the actions of their relative peers and their superiors who comprised the ranks of the legal profession. Whatever the individual virtues of legal functionaries may have been, they were nonetheless products of a society that was inclined to view members of the labouring population in particular (and not entirely favourable) ways. As such, they had inherited attitudes and assumptions about their inferiors, which could colour their encounters with them during the legal process.¹³

This chapter explores these themes by analysing a convoluted and protracted set of Star Chamber suits and countersuits that were filed between 1602 and 1606.¹⁴ The imbroglio was occasioned by a dispute about who should inherit the property of Richard Cockshott, an innholder from St Giles in the Fields, London, who had considerable assets at the time of his death in 1592. His testamentary arrangements – or, as it happened, alleged lack thereof – subsequently proved controversial.¹⁵ On one side was Thomas Parke, a London dyer and Richard’s brother-in-law, who had, after the death of Richard’s wife Alice in 1594, successfully positioned himself as sole inheritor. On the other side was Thomas Cockshott, a Surrey yeoman who, as Richard’s nephew, claimed that he was entitled to the innholder’s remaining assets. The dispute trundled through multiple courts before eventually making its way to Star Chamber. There, Cockshott embarked on a last-ditch effort to wrest his uncle’s property from Parke by challenging the veracity of the evidence that Parke had marshalled to procure it. A pair of London labourers called John Codnor and Christopher Hill were at the centre of this suite of Star Chamber litigation in various capacities. The former appeared three times as a defendant who was accused of committing perjury for Parke, while the latter served as a key witness for Cockshott.

Table 7.1. Parties involved in the disputes between Thomas Parke and Thomas Cockshott.

Source: Works cited in note 14

The material considered here enables an analysis on multiple and complementary scales. The first section explores the ways in which a general phenomenon played out in a particular instance: in this case, how and why the two labourers became involved in the dispute, as well as the legal and extra-legal consequences of their involvement. The following section reconstructs issues that are often obscured due to a lack of available documentation: namely, the nature and practical limits of an individual labouring defendant’s legal knowledge, the ways in which these limitations shaped his room for manoeuvre and the forms of legal aid that were available for socio-economically disadvantaged defendants. The concluding section assesses the extent to which this Star Chamber case can enhance our understanding of labouring people’s interconnected experiences of both civil litigation and the criminal law in early modern England.

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To the extent that Star Chamber records were concerned with uncovering malfeasance that had purportedly occurred in earlier rounds of litigation, they are useful for reconstructing the factors that caused labouring people to testify in the first place. Such witnesses were typically drawn into property disputes as a result of knowledge they had accumulated – or could plausibly claim to have accumulated – over the course of their employment histories. In some instances, they were enlisted to depose about incidents that they had witnessed decades previously. In others, they were procured to comment on more recent events. By the time some disputes made it to court, labouring people were the only witnesses who were still alive or in a position to testify about the incidents in question; this presumably made their testimony all the more valuable. All of these factors were at play in the case considered here. By their own accounts, John Codnor and Christopher Hill had worked for Richard Cockshott for about fifteen years prior to his death. Along with two servants and Richard’s wife Alice, both were present during his final illness.

The parties at variance – Thomas Parke and Thomas Cockshott – both sought to capitalize on the quartet’s experience, albeit in different ways. Parke was first off the mark. In 1595, about a year after his sister Alice’s death, he recruited Codnor and two of Richard’s other servants to depose in London’s commissary court about a nuncupative will that Richard had allegedly made.¹⁶ As a result of their testimony, Parke secured his brother-in-law’s property. Thomas Cockshott then sued Parke for trespass in King’s Bench; once again, Parke relied on Codnor’s testimony to thwart Cockshott’s claims. Finally, in 1602, like other litigants whose ambitions had been frustrated, Cockshott turned to Star Chamber as a court of last resort.

Cockshott used Star Chamber to attack the credibility of Parke, his witnesses and their testimony by suing them for subornation of perjury and perjury, respectively, and by claiming that his uncle had in fact died intestate. Cockshott’s bill of complaint, like others in this subgenre of suits, formulaically traded in commonplaces regarding the direct correlation between poverty and dishonesty. This link purportedly became more pronounced when prospective witnesses were offered rewards or were subjected to pressure by those who sought their testimony.¹⁷ Such ideas continued to enjoy purchase well after Star Chamber’s abolition. As one minister remarked in an assize sermon from 1682: ‘the most usual occasions and common temptations to this sin [of perjury were] poverty and necessity; covetousness and hope of reward’.¹⁸ Cockshott’s bill of complaint alleged that Codnor ‘did falsly and corruptly sweare and depose [as he had] because [he] was hyered and suborned thereunto by Parke’ on multiple occasions: first in the commissary court, and then in King’s Bench.¹⁹ Yet the most detailed and damning information against Parke and his witnesses was presented not by Cockshott himself, but by Christopher Hill. Of the four labourers and servants who were ostensibly privy to their employer’s final arrangements, Hill was unique not only in his willingness to present a version of events that was amenable to Cockshott, but also in his readiness to testify against his former co-workers.

Lawsuits could create circumstances in which members of the labouring population were brought into conflict with one another. Where labouring individuals were recruited into temporary alliances with their litigious superiors, they were often expected to provide evidence against their relative peers. In his Star Chamber suits against Codnor, Cockshott relied heavily on both Hill’s testimony and his willingness to denounce his former co-worker. To support the allegation that Codnor had been bribed by Parke to provide false evidence about Richard’s nuncupative will, Hill made multiple points. He deposed that his fellow labourer was of ‘small creditt or abilitie’. To buttress his own credibility, Hill claimed that although he and Codnor had both allowed Parke to buy them dinner, he left when they were offered ‘some hosehold stuffe’ if they would give ‘false’ evidence in support of the dyer’s claims about the will. According to Hill, Codnor had no such scruples. Hill outlined the disbursements that had underwritten the other labourer’s testimony, recalling – among other things – that Codnor had ‘confesse[d]’ in private conversation ‘that he had coles & wood given him by [Parke] to say as he would have him’.²⁰ In making such points about Codnor’s socio-economic position and his susceptibility to material encouragements, Hill employed tropes that were used to cast aspersions on and discredit labouring witnesses throughout the period.²¹

Indeed, for Hill, Codnor appears to have been little more than a means to an end, and he used the prospect of a post-depositional windfall as a kind of security to back mundane transactions. John Browne, a journeyman shoemaker, recalled that the labourer had come to his master’s shop, demanding that they hurry to repair the shoes he had left because he wanted to wear them when he testified.²² Browne said that he would be more inclined to do so if Hill would ‘bestowe some drinke uppon’ him and repay an outstanding debt to his master. Hill replied that although he was unable to do either at the time because he had ‘but 6d.’, he expected that a significant amount of money (indeed, an implausibly high sum of ‘a hundred powndes or two’!) would be coming his way ‘if all things [fell] owt right’ and Cockshott won his case. He promised to use this to pay off his debts and buy Browne a drink.²³ It is unclear what came of Hill’s offer or expected reward; presumably little.

As the case of Christopher Hill and others suggest, fleeting and mutually self-interested alliances between litigants and labouring witnesses may well have provided the latter with an opportunity to make a bit on the side.²⁴ But such gains – whether real or illusory – could come at the expense of their peers. We might note a degree of irony here. Where perjury accusations were levelled against members of the labouring population, other labouring witnesses were, as a result of the circles in which they moved, often uniquely placed to comment on the actions of the accused. One labourer’s denunciation of another presumably carried a patina of legitimacy that was lacking in a labourer’s denunciation of, say, a gentleman.²⁵ Furthermore, from the perspective of a labourer who did the denouncing, the stakes were lower; their testimony was presumably less likely to result in retribution in the form of extra-legal exactions related to employment and so forth. The momentary elevation of some labouring deponents ‘in court’ was thus predicated upon their willingness to cannibalize those of roughly comparable socio-economic position. If some categories of litigation occasioned the expression of solidarities among the ranks of the labouring population, others generated antagonisms within it that furthered the ambitions of their ‘betters’ in the final instance.

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Social bonds shaped labouring people’s experiences of litigation in other ways. The degree to which defendants were able to mount a successful defence in Star Chamber depended partly on the nature of the social networks of which they were a part and the connections that they enjoyed. Historians have highlighted the degree to which labouring defendants might benefit from a combination of communal fellow-feeling and (in)formal legal advice when responding to the charges against them. In their depositions, some who were accused of riot demonstrated knowledge that enabled them to manipulate loopholes and ambiguities in the law to their own advantage.²⁶

But where members of the labouring population found themselves in Star Chamber as relatively atomized defendants – as appears to have been the case with Codnor – matters were more complicated. It was one thing to have an abstract notion of what constituted law and justice, or a sense of one’s rights (customary or otherwise).²⁷ It was another to have a detailed understanding of how one might assert oneself while navigating the vagaries of a relatively unfamiliar legal process. In such circumstances, there were educational, monetary and social barriers to overcome, and labouring defendants might find themselves reliant on the advice and assistance of their better-informed superiors. Where the motivations of particular superiors were ambiguous – if not baldly self-interested – this dependency could occasion difficulties for defendants.

Codnor’s case offers an example of the sort of predicament in which solitary labouring defendants might find themselves. Around the time Cockshott first sued him in Star Chamber in 1602, the labourer was in Newgate. He claimed that a debt of ‘£5 or thereabouts’ had landed him in prison. His detractors – presumably attempting to undermine his credibility further – heard that he had been arrested for ‘stealing [a] silver cup or goblett’ and had been in Newgate ‘diverse tymes [for] theft and cosenage’.²⁸ Whatever the exact cause of his imprisonment, Codnor was still expected to put in an answer to Cockshott’s bill of complaint against him. By analysing the well-documented processes that resulted in the production of Codnor’s answer, we can better appreciate the factors that could shape the experience of a labouring defendant and circumscribe the options available to them.

The labourer was initially left to his own devices. Although he was being sued as a result of his involvement with his co-defendant Parke, the dyer apparently neglected to shepherd him through the relevant stages of Star Chamber litigation.²⁹ A saviour (of sorts) then appeared. Perhaps thinking that the labourer’s current position would render him susceptible to an offer that would transform him from a legal obstacle into an asset, an associate of Cockshott’s, a London baker called John Wilkinson, visited him in Newgate. (Wilkinson was assisting Cockshott in the prosecution of various suits and would eventually be countersued by Parke in Star Chamber for maintenance – that is, assisting and supporting another person’s litigation; he was motivated to do so in part because he was trying to lease the disputed land in Knightsbridge from Cockshott.³⁰) Wilkinson told Codnor that ‘if [he] would unsaye that which he had previously saied’ and would ‘say as Christopher Hill had saied’ (that is, deny that the evidence he had given for Parke in the testamentary dispute was true and admit that he had been bribed by Parke to depose as he had), he would ‘helpe [him] owt of prison’.³¹ Codnor refused, maintaining that he had told the truth and therefore wished to deny the charges against him. Wilkinson then reminded him that he was nonetheless obliged to make his answer to Star Chamber. The labourer asked how ‘he might make his answere to the bill w[it]hout charge for that he had no monie’. At this point, Wilkinson generously stepped into the breach, offering to make a petition requesting he admitted in forma pauperis.³² The labourer consented. Why might he have agreed to receive assistance from an ally of the person who was suing him?

To appreciate Codnor’s situation, we should consider the likelihood of a labourer having a robust familiarity with the legal options that were available for socio-economically disadvantaged defendants in Star Chamber. Relevant here is the 1495 statute intended to ensure that poor individuals were not barred from taking legal action and receiving justice in the common-law courts.³³ Persons worth less than £5 (or who received less than 40s a year from land) could petition to be admitted in forma pauperis. If successful, they were assigned counsel and their legal costs were waived. By the sixteenth century, similar practices operated in the equity and conciliar courts, though the precise mechanisms by which they had developed remain obscure. Historians have noted the provision’s role in enabling individuals to initiate litigation – particularly in Requests, where persons admitted in forma pauperis are estimated to have accounted for around 10% of plaintiffs.³⁴ (Though it must be noted that a sizeable portion of these individuals creatively defined their worth and should not be counted among the ranks of the chronically impoverished.) Comparatively little attention, however, has been paid to legal aid provisions for defendants. We know even less about how knowledgeable the legitimately poor were about the discretionary dispensations to which they could be entitled in such circumstances, or the routes whereby they may have acquired such knowledge.³⁵

While in forma pauperis status was granted to defendants in the conciliar and equity courts, evidence suggests that it was rare in comparison to the provisions available for those seeking to initiate suits. A small sample of petitions requesting admission in forma pauperis in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries indicates that 4% were made by defendants, the majority in Requests (and none in Star Chamber).³⁶ To explore Star Chamber’s willingness to allocate legal aid, we therefore have to triangulate between various sources while engaging in a bit of conjecture. According to William Hudson, Star Chamber discouraged petitions requesting in forma pauperis status on the part of would-be litigants; this was done partly out of a desire to prevent the court becoming host to the ‘clamorous and vexatious suits of poor people living in remote parts’. But he continued, hinting at the ways in which the less affluent could become the tools of their litigious superiors: ‘poor people shall be made defendants in this court, for many times they are made instruments to do the greatest offences’. In such circumstances – where poor individuals were ‘joined defendants’ with ‘able persons’ – Hudson remarked that they ‘[ought] upon their oath … to be admitted [in forma pauperis], and have counsel assigned unto them’.³⁷ This logic was similar to points made in scripture and canon law, which maintained that socio-economically disadvantaged persons should be enabled to defend themselves from ‘legal oppression and exploitation’ at the hands of the more powerful.³⁸ Surviving – if fragmentary – evidence from the sixteenth century suggests that it was indeed possible for Star Chamber defendants (as well as plaintiffs) to receive counsel and have their fees waived. But it is difficult to gauge whether such isolated examples were representative of broader trends, or to assess the precise socio-economic positions of the defendants in question.³⁹

For the present purposes, we might assume that Codnor was statistically unlikely to have been friendly with anyone who had appeared as a plaintiff in forma pauperis in Star Chamber (or even in Requests). He was presumably even less likely to have known someone who had done so as a defendant. If so, he was ill-equipped to gainsay the advice and assistance offered to him by an individual with knowledge of the relevant process. Codnor’s assent to Wilkinson’s proposal to petition on his behalf for legal aid might appear naïve, but it is unclear what he might have done otherwise.

Although Wilkinson’s offer set in motion a chain of events that technically enabled the labourer to participate in the legal process, little suggests that Codnor was able to shape the proceedings in a meaningful way. Instead, he was pushed through the stages of procedure by various of his superiors who had little interest in directly engaging him. Codnor’s answer was effectively drawn up and submitted without his having any say in its production or precise knowledge of its contents. This was possible because legal functionaries at multiple stages of the process were apparently content to interact only with Wilkinson – the labourer’s self-appointed intermediary – rather than the labourer himself. As we have seen, Wilkinson had a vested interest in securing an answer that contained a confession. After his attempts to pressure the imprisoned labourer into ‘voluntarily’ making such a statement failed, he appears to have accomplished the same result due to the carelessness of legal professionals. That such carelessness was exhibited suggests that we might do well to be sceptical about the quality of legal aid that the legitimately poor could expect to receive, even if – in theory – their poverty did not work to their disadvantage.

Negligence was initially displayed by the attorney who was appointed to assist the labourer’s case. When Wilkinson successfully petitioned for Codnor to be admitted in forma pauperis to make his answer, a Mr Lancaster of Gray’s Inn was assigned as his counsel. In a passing encounter, Lancaster was subsequently questioned by an acquaintance and fellow attorney about what, precisely, he had done for Codnor. The answer appears to have been rather little. Lancaster admitted that he ‘never spake’ with the labourer, ‘nor ever saw him to his remembrance’.⁴⁰ He added that someone – an associate of Wilkinson’s – had brought the answer to him ‘ready ingrossed’ and told him that it was Codnor’s ‘owne confession and answere [so] he did sett his hand to the same’, apparently without further ado.⁴¹ It is difficult to say whether Lancaster or someone else in his position would have been as willing to sign off on an answer in the absence of a more socio-economically advantaged defendant. The issue here is less to do with the ability of a particular defendant to pay the requisite legal fees and more to do with the regard, or lack thereof, accorded to labouring defendants. Lancaster may well have calculated that Codnor would be unable or unwilling to protest any perceived legal impropriety committed against him. Perhaps he did not bother to think much about it at all.

Having procured the answer, Wilkinson returned to Newgate to collect Codnor and proceed with the next step of the Star Chamber process. The labourer remembered that about a week after their first conversation, Wilkinson gave money – either ‘3s 3d or 3s 9d’ – to one of the keepers to ‘paie [his] ffees for his release owt of prison’ for a day and took him to see William Mill, the clerk of Star Chamber. En route, Wilkinson told Codnor that he would be swearing on two issues that were enumerated in the document. First, that it represented his ‘true answere’ to Cockshott’s bill of complaint against him. Second, that he ‘was not worth above five pownd’ (the relevant threshold to be admitted in forma pauperis). At the time, Codnor appears to have operated under the impression that the document’s contents did in fact resemble what he had previously told Wilkinson in Newgate – namely, that he had told the truth when he deposed for Parke and, as such, wished to deny the charges against him. And because – as Codnor subsequently told others – he ‘was not worth half [£5]’, he had seen no problem in assenting under oath to that portion of his answer’s alleged contents.⁴²

As he told it, Codnor had been reduced to a passive actor in the brief time he spent before the clerk. In theory, when Star Chamber defendants exhibited their answers, they were meant to be sworn and (at the clerk’s discretion) examined on the accuracy of their statement.⁴³ This procedure appears to have been followed laxly in the case under consideration. The labourer recalled that before and during his time in Mill’s chambers, he was shown a ‘writinge in parchment’. But none of the individuals involved, including the clerk, apparently bothered to read the document to him or ask him anything about his intended answer. Codnor offered no retrospective commentary on whether he might have had reservations about the document or felt too intimidated to request that it be read to him; neither seems entirely beyond the realm of possibility. In any case, when questioned, he assented under oath to the veracity of its contents. His answer was filed, and he was returned to Newgate.

It was not until months later – after Codnor’s release from prison – that he realized he had, in fact, formally confessed to perjury in this answer.⁴⁴ Thomas Baldwin, a lawyer who either worked for or socialized with Parke, corroborated the labourer’s (and aspects of Wilkinson’s) version of the events leading up to his time before the Star Chamber clerk. He also provided details about how outraged Codnor had been when someone finally bothered to read ‘his’ answer to him. Baldwin recalled that he had been at Parke’s house in Holborn with a handful of others, who, having received a copy of Codnor’s answer, questioned the labourer about how it had materialized. Codnor said that was never ‘given counsel or gave any counsel for directions to draw up his answer’. When questioned further, he became angry and described the degree to which he had been systematically deprived of knowledge about stages of the process that bore directly upon him. He ‘swore a great othe that [he] neither heard [Cockshott’s] bill, nor [his own] answeare ever reade before that tyme: but saith that by reason that he coulde not reade, he p[er]ceaved that he had bene abused [by Wilkinson]’.⁴⁵ Codnor might have been hoodwinked, but his answer had nonetheless been produced. The legal drama in which he was – in the estimation of its more significant players – little more than an extra could continue.

How much stock should we put in these accounts of Codnor’s manipulation and mistreatment, particularly in light of Star Chamber litigants’ penchant for melodrama? Of course, the labourer may well have been strategically emphasizing his illiteracy in an effort to present himself as a hapless victim of Wilkinson’s – and by extension, Cockshott’s – chicanery. Calling attention to his ignorance and weakness could serve a dual function: one immediate and the other more abstract. On the one hand, it enabled Codnor to distance himself from involvement in the construction of a document that could prove inconvenient for his co-defendant Parke (whose house he was in when this outburst occurred). On the other, plebeian narratives of powerlessness could play well in the equity courts.⁴⁶ Much of the information regarding the production of the labourer’s answer was generated when Parke filed his countersuit against Cockshott and Wilkinson. As such, there could have been good reasons for Codnor to present the dyer’s opponents in the worst possible light.

But equally, it remains the case that the labourer’s illiteracy – like his poverty and relative lack of familiarity with the relevant technicalities of legal procedure – was a form of dependency. When expected to answer the Star Chamber charges against him in the absence of funds or disinterested legal advice, Codnor had been obliged to take the word of the more knowledgeable Wilkinson at face value. As a result, he had inadvertently placed himself in a position that made it difficult for him to dispute the dictated terms of his legal engagement. While the labourer could retrospectively attempt to save face by highlighting the ways in which he had been abused by various of his superiors, he could not erase the conditions that rendered him vulnerable in the first place.

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In relation to the total number of labouring witnesses who deposed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century litigation of various types, it is impossible to quantify the proportion that eventually landed in Star Chamber as a result of their testimony. To be sure, all members of the labouring population were susceptible to having their depositions called into question because of the subordinated and dependent socio-economic positions they occupied. Filing perjury charges against labouring witnesses in Star Chamber was akin to picking low-hanging fruit: the negative stereotypes were in place, and all that was required were inconvenienced litigants who had the inclination, time and disposable income to capitalize on them. Nonetheless, in the grand scheme of things, the experience of those who became defendants in Star Chamber was probably not comparable to that of the majority of their peers.

We might assume that John Codnor’s experience was even less representative. It could be added to the pile of Star Chamber stories: a colourful incident of individual misfortune, perhaps, but an aberration in an otherwise well-intentioned and functional system. To gain a holistic appreciation of labouring people’s experiences of litigation and the law, it would be more profitable to consider the extent to which his case might be illustrative of more widespread phenomena that were – for a variety of reasons – unlikely to generate much of an evidentiary record.

Codnor’s case provides an opportunity to reflect on the nature of plebeian legal knowledge and the degree to which it enabled labouring people to assert themselves in various settings. To be sure, many were aware of their rights and knew how legal institutions could be employed in an effort to maintain them. Nor were they particularly squeamish about initiating proceedings against their ‘betters’, should the circumstances require. Copyhold tenants knew about the customs in their locality; labourers knew that they could take action against employers who failed to pay their wages; and so forth. While such context-specific knowledge was useful, it was not transferrable to every legal scenario in which labouring people might conceivably find themselves. A given labouring individual might be capable of navigating some situations with relative confidence but be hamstrung in others. Codnor’s dilemma – occasioned in part by his lack of familiarity with the right that poor defendants had to petition for the discretionary dispensation of legal aid – illustrates one way in which members of the labouring population could operate at a structural disadvantage in court.⁴⁷

Where labouring individuals were compelled to navigate their way through relatively unfamiliar legal situations, their ability to assert themselves was further shaped by legal functionaries that they encountered. Although legal aid had theoretically been obtained for Codnor, in practice it amounted to little; his engagement with members of the legal profession was perfunctory in some instances and virtually non-existent in others. While Codnor’s experience offers an extreme example of the lack of regard that could be paid to a poor defendant, by consulting other sources we can appreciate the factors that had enabled it to occur in the first place. Various commentaries on the legal system and the duties of those who comprised its ranks observed that members of the labouring population could be tedious to interact with and suggested that functionaries might be tempted to treat individuals differently based on their socio-economic position. For example, one seventeenth-century treatise noted that ‘a right jurisprudent … acts not pro imperio, arbitrarily, but humbly, honestly, and conscientiously converses with all sorts of clients, whether in forma pauperis, or divitis, rich or poor’.⁴⁸ In presenting an ideal standard and exhorting lawyers and justices to strive towards it, such commentaries implied that alternative modes of engagement existed. This is not to suggest that all of these people were wilfully negligent or dismissive in their interactions with the poor; rather, the point is that they had the capacity to become so on any given occasion without a great deal of effort.

Plebeians’ ability to use the law for their own purposes or mount a successful defence when they found themselves on the wrong side of it was therefore predicated on a number of contingencies. Here, we might be tempted to reaffirm familiar points about the discrepancies between the criminal and the civil law in the period. If the operation of the former laid bare and reinforced the fundamental inequalities of early modern society, the workings of the latter enabled them to be temporarily suspended in court.⁴⁹ Where members of the labouring population are concerned, however, this distinction holds in some instances, but less so in others. The category of Star Chamber suits examined here reveals some of the ways in which their involvement in civil litigation – however well-intentioned – could sour. As Codnor’s experience demonstrates, labourers could be penalized for participating in civil suits as witnesses in one court; then, in another, even the structures of aid that underwrote their participation in the criminal proceedings against them could be used to disenfranchise them of a voice. To the extent that the legal system generated circumstances that allowed plebeians to be shuffled through stages of procedure that they grasped imperfectly, it was scarcely conducive to their empowerment.