In the year 1587 the Star Chamber refused to entertain a criminal charge of perjury against a man who was charged with having perjured himself in waging his law, in a prior proceeding. The Lord Chancellor rather dissented from the decision of the majority of the judges and asked if the effect of the wager, based on perjury was to discharge the debt sued for. The judges answered that it was, Manwood, C. B., maintaining that it was because of the plaintiff’s folly, in sueing for debt, rather than upon an assumpsit, wherein wager of law would not lie.[72] In his report of Slade’s case, in 1602, Sir Edward Coke remarked that the court would not allow a man to wage his law, until the court had admonished both the principal and the compurgators and upon due examination as to their qualifications and the merits of the cause, in order to ascertain if the case was one wherein wager of law was allowable.[73] Several cases came before Chief Justice Holt, during the latter part of the seventeenth century and some of the cases, which have been noted, will be briefly referred to. In the Company of Glazier’s Case, which arose in 1699, the Company sued in an action of debt and the defendant waged his law. Counselor Northey appeared for the Company and when the defendant appeared with his compurgators, he insisted that if he swore falsely, the court did not have to receive his wager of law, but to this contention, Chief Justice Holt replied: “We can admonish him, but if he will stand by his law, we cannot hinder it, seeing it is a method the law allows.” Plaintiff’s counsel then insisted that such a holding would be a dangerous precedent, because it would have the legal effect of compelling litigants sueing in debt, to extend the practice of sueing upon an assumpsit still further, but the doughty Chief Justice replied to this argument that “We will carry them no further,” so the wager of law was received, because it was a “method the law allows.”[74] The Chief Justice practically reversed his holding in the Company of Glazier’s Case, two years later, however, for in exactly the same kind of an action of debt, arising on a by-law, in London vs. Wood, the court refused to entertain the defendant’s plea of wager of law, remarking that the plaintiff’s counsel in the Company of Glazier’s Case (Northey), had yielded too much—although he seemed to do all that an earnest counsel can do, to urge his plea and then except to the court’s action, when it is overruled—in characterizing that decision, the court observing that “It was a gudgeon swallowed and so it passed without observation,” meaning that a bad precedent had been recorded because not strenuously enough objected to.[75]