England Chancery Court Records

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Chancery Court
What is a Chancery? A simple definition says "Chancery Proceedings record disputes over inheritance, land, debts, etc., from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries"(Gibbons). FitzHugh states, "Chancery as a court of law dates from about 1348. It was a court of equity based on Roman Law to deal with cases for which the Common Law made no provision, and later with cases remediable under Common Law but in which the plaintiff would have found himself under a legal disadvantage. It was absorbed into the Supreme Court of Judicature in 1873"(FitzHugh, 65) Garrett explains, "Originally, all cases were oral. . . [the] plaintiff and the defendant appeared before the Judge, and indulged in an altercation on the spot. Later, however, the practice grew up of setting down the initial proceedings in writing"(Garrett, 1). Garrett continues by explaining the different types of documents and the general order in which they were made. There are two divisions in the Court of Chancery, being the court of Common Law and the court of Equity. This paper discusses only the court of Equity. The primary documents are of two kinds: a) Proceedings; and b) Registers.

Content
Proceedings consist of the following documents: 1) Bill of Complaint 2) Writ of Subpoena 3) Answer by the defendant, or Plea to reject the Bill 4) Replication, or Exception, by the plaintiff 5) Rejoinder by the defendant 6) Rebuttal by the plaintiff (sometimes) 7) Surebuttal by the defendant (sometimes) 8) Interrogatories 9) Depositions by witnesses 10) Bill of Revival  Registers consist of the following types of documents:  1) Orders and Decrees 2) Awards and Agreements  The Family History Library has no original records from the court of Chancery. The collection consists of calendars, abstracts, and indexes. To find Chancery Court records, look in the Place Search of the Family History Library Catalog under:

ENGLAND - COURT RECORDS

Chancery Court records are held at The National Archives.

Chancery Calendars, Indexes and Abstracts
Some of the Chancery court records have been indexed. See the article by Ronald A. Hill mentioned below to see a list of indexes for different time periods. Also, two of The National Archives Research Guides “Chancery Proceedings: Equity Suits from 1558" and “Chancery Proceedings: Equity Suits before 1558” list the records and what records have been indexed.

The National Archives website has available the “Equity Pleadings Database”, which includes part of the C6 class of records and is searchable by name or place. Also, some of these records have been indexed in The National Archives Catalogue. Search the catalogue with an ancestor's surname in the "Word or Phrase" field and the letter C in the "Department or Series code" field.

Two men, Charles Allen Bernau and George Frederick Tudor Sherwood, have both complied calendars and indexes to chancery material. The Family History Library has the Bernau Collection and Sherwood Collection:


 * Genealogical Extracts from Chancery Proceedings by Bernau.
 * Depositions from Chancery Proceedings, 1714-1758, Exchequer, Charity Depositions, With a Few Before 1714 by Bernau.
 * The Sherwood Record Collection: The Sherwood Slip Index by Surname and County..

For cases from the eighteenth century forward, try searching Google Books for summaries of chancery cases in publications such as The Jurist.

Chancery Proceedings and Depositions Indexes and Published Records
The information in the following chart was compiled from The National Archives Research Guides to Chancery Records, and Ronald A. Hill's article “English Genealogical Research: Using Chancery Court Proceedings”. National Genealogical Society Quarterly. Volume 91, No. 2, June 2007. pp. 111-138. Digital version at NGS website (£) (used with permission).


 * Miscellaneous set of answers and subsidiary documents are in C 4, which is searchable.
 * For C 6, C 7, C 8 and C 10, there are indexes to disputed wills (by the name of the testator, not of the plaintiff) available at The National Archives. P W Coldham compiled these idexes.

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