An impeachment is not a technical proceeding, as at _Nisi Prius_ or in a county court, where the rigid rules of the Common Law prevail. On the contrary, it is a proceeding according to Parliamentary Law, with rules of its own, unknown in ordinary courts. The formal statement and reduplication of words, constituting the stock-in-trade of so many lawyers, are exchanged for a broader manner, more consistent with the transactions of actual life. The precision of history and of common sense is enough, without the technical precision of an indictment. From time immemorial there has been a just distinction between proceedings in Parliament and proceedings in the ordinary courts of justice, which I insist shall not be abandoned. The distant reign of Richard the Second, beyond the misfortunes touching us so much in Shakespeare, supplies a presiding rule which has been a pole-star of Constitutional Law; nor is this in any vague, uncertain language, but in the most clear and explicit terms, illumined since by great lights of law. On what was called an appeal in Parliament, or impeachment, it has solemnly declared that the Lords were not of right obliged to proceed according to the course or rules of the Roman law or according to the law or usage of any of the inferior courts of Westminster Hall, but by the law and usage of Parliament, which was itself a court. “In this Parliament [in the 11th year of King Richard the Second, A. D. 1387-88] all the Lords then present, spiritual as well as temporal, claimed as their franchise that the weighty matters moved in this Parliament, and which shall be moved in other Parliaments in future times, touching the peers of the land, shall be managed, adjudged, and discussed by the course of Parliament, and in no sort by the Law Civil, or by the common law of the land, used in the other lower courts of the kingdom.”[165] The Commons approved the proceedings, and it has been remarked, in an important official report, that “neither then nor ever since have they made any objection or protestation that the rule laid down by the Lords … ought not to be applied to the impeachments of commoners as well as peers.”[166] Accordingly Lord Coke declares, that “all weighty matters in any Parliament moved concerning the peers of the realm, or commoners in Parliament assembled, ought to be determined, and adjudged, and discussed by the course of the Parliament, and not by the Civil Law, nor yet by the common laws of this realm used in more inferior courts.” Then, founding on the precedent of 11th Richard the Second, he announces, that “judges ought not to give any opinion of _a matter of Parliament_, because it is not to be decided by the common laws, but _secundum legem et consuetudinem Parliamenti_”; and he adds, “So the judges in divers Parliaments have confessed.”[167]