to stay waste on the estates of private persons, and to secure the tithes of livings, from which ministers had been ejected, in the hands of the churchwardens till their title could be tried.[36] They acted, in short, as if they had a plenary authority in matters of freehold right, where any member of their own house was a party, and in every case as full an equitable jurisdiction as the court of chancery. Though in the more settled state of things which ensued, these anomalous orders do not so frequently occur, we find several assumptions of power which show a disposition to claim as much as the circumstances of any particular case should lead them to think expedient for the parties, or honourable to themselves.[37] _Resistance made by the commons._--The lower house of parliament, which hardly reckoned itself lower in dignity, and was something more than equal in substantial power, did not look without jealousy on these pretensions. They demurred to a privilege asserted by the Lords of assessing themselves in bills of direct taxation; and, having on one occasion reluctantly permitted an amendment of that nature to pass, took care to record their dissent from the principle by a special entry in the journal.[38] An amendment having been introduced into a bill for regulating the press, sent up by the Commons in the session of 1661, which exempted the houses of peers from search for unlicensed books, it was resolved not to agree to it; and the bill dropped for that time.[39] Even in far more urgent circumstances, while the parliament sat at Oxford in the year of the plague, a bill to prevent the progress of infection was lost, because the lords insisted that their houses should not be subjected to the general provisions for security.[40] These ill-judged demonstrations of a design to exempt themselves from that equal submission to the law, which is required in all well-governed states, and had ever been remarkable in our constitution, naturally raised a prejudice against the Lords, both in the other house of parliament, and among the common lawyers.