I 
THE RISE OF THE 
APPEAL JURISDICTION 
It is one of the paradoxes of history that the body which at one juncture in the 
evolution of the common law most direly threatened it, should by a succession 
of events have become a chief instrument in cultivating acceptance of that law 
in the remote corners of the earth. Under the Tudors and the early Stuart 
kings the Privy Council and its appanages had been fashioned by sagacious 
statesmen into an engine of law enforcement, with a hybrid jurisprudence of 
its own, that cut into the ancient ways of civil litigation and criminal prosecution, 
with little tenderness for the safeguards which Englishmen had come to 
look upon as their right. The arbitrary and headstrong course of Charles I and 
a cumulation of grievances and exasperations led to a sudden undoing of this 
work of generations in July, 1641, at the hands of the Long Parliament. 1 Shorn 
of judicial power almost to the very derma, the Council, nevertheless, retained 
the barely obvious follicles of an authority which a gradual awareness of the 
new world and the problems of its government were to quicken into growth. 
This book is concerned with the first phase of the revival —the development 
of the Council's appellate jurisdiction during the late seventeenth century and 
in the eighteenth century up to the Peace of Paris (1783) —a jurisdiction which 
influenced profoundly the planting of the common law in the United States. 
No less significant was the eventual effect upon the British Empire itself, for 
it was upon the activities and experiences of this period that the statutory 
Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was founded. 
These things all lay unguessed in the inscrutable future when the statute 16 
Charles I, c. 10, was enacted, bringing to an end an epoch in English constitutional 
history and, as the legislators no doubt believed, terminating further 
judicial potency of the Council. The act is a landmark in English law, and the 
American colonists later never quite abandoned the notion that it should serve 
equally to mark the limits of intrusion upon their own jurisdiction. Since so 
much that was done in respect of the plantations stems from this act, our inquiry 
quite properly must begin with an examination of the statutory language. 
Section 5 of the statute provided that 
1 16 Charles I, c. 10.