1616 was a catastrophic year in the history of the English judicial system: a year, wrote Bacon, ‘consecrate to justice’. The story of the political, legal and personal controversies which reached a climax in that year is well known, for in some ways those controversies formed the first phase of the seventeenth-century constitutional revolution. But the story of the dispute between the common lawyers and the Chancery will bear telling in detail. The viewpoint of Coke and his supporters has been glossed over by most writers on the subject, who have tended to accept Gardiner's statement that on the Chancery question ‘it has been universally admitted that Coke was in the wrong’. Yet it is clear that Coke's fears about the rule of law were shared by many of his brethren and his profession. The common law, because of its appearance of antiquity and continuity, commanded some popular support, whereas the newer systems, most of them worked by Civil lawyers, were often associated with unlimited royal prerogative and tyranny. In the first decade of his reign, King James I had evinced little sympathy for the common law in spite of his outward affirmations, and it was widely rumoured that he wished to replace it with the Civil law; the arguments over prohibitions and prerogative courts were at least partly caused by the fear of Civil law encroachments.