Few features of English society were subjected to such sustained and voluble criticism during the revolution as the legal system. The common law was predominantly the product of the medieval world, its character determined by the needs of a relatively static society. The increased social mobility of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the consequent growth in the tendency to litigation, placed novel strains on the common law. These it could meet only by sporadic, haphazard patterns of accretion which left its workings more unwieldy than ever. In many cases the old local courts had yielded jurisdiction to the central courts at Westminster, which had in turn to be supplemented by the expanding equity and prerogative courts; but all these courts developed their own abuses which many found intolerable. The abolition of the prerogative courts by the Long Parliament, although removing political grievances, increased the burdens which the common law already had to bear and to which the chaos of civil war could only add still further.