Bankruptcy in the Court of Chancery, 1674-1750

This thesis examines cases involving bankruptcy brought before the court of Chancery between 1674-1750. The historiography of pre-modern England has tended to treat bankruptcy and Chancery as two distinct areas of scholarly research, meaning that Chancery has largely been overlooked in the existing historiography of early modern bankruptcy. Similarly, the scholarship on the equitable jurisdiction of Chancery has failed to account for how the bankruptcy process interacted with the court. The thesis is the first substantial work to analyse the manner in which the procedure of bankruptcy was litigated within the court. As such, the work makes an original contribution to our understanding of early modern bankruptcy by demonstrating how an initially autonomous legal procedure came to Chancery to seek the aid or assistance of the court in the wider debt-recovery process.

In order to undertake such a task, it is necessary to pay close attention to the procedures of the court, and especially to the people and processes that went into creating the documents which have survived. The thesis analyses each individual stage of proceeding in isolation — which forms the basis of the chapter structure — by paying close attention to the types of documentation created and presented to the court at these different phases in the legal process. Because each stage of proceeding required a different ordering of language in order to conform to the legal requirements of the court, we can only fully understand how bankruptcy was litigated by pausing and paying detailed attention to the types of documents created at each individual stage. Ultimately, the thesis utilises Chancery sources to reconstruct the processes around bankruptcy, making an important intervention in the use and classification of legal documents by historians, both within and outside Chancery.