The judicial power of the council was in some instances founded upon particular acts of parliament, giving it power to hear and determine certain causes. Many petitions likewise were referred to it from parliament, especially where they were left unanswered by reason of a dissolution. But, independently of this delegated authority, it is certain that the king's council did anciently exercise, as well out of parliament as in it, a very great jurisdiction, both in causes criminal and civil. Some, however, have contended, that whatever they did in this respect was illegal, and an encroachment upon the common law and Magna Charta. And be the common law what it may, it seems an indisputable violation of the charter in its most admirable and essential article, to drag men in questions of their freehold or liberty before a tribunal which neither granted them a trial by their peers nor always respected the law of the land. Against this usurpation the patriots of those times never ceased to lift their voices. A statute of the fifth year of Edward III. provides that no man shall be attached, nor his property seized into the king's hands, against the form of the great charter and the law of the land. In the twenty-fifth of the same king it was enacted, that "none shall be taken by petition or suggestion to the king or his council, unless it be by indictment or presentment, or by writ original at the common law, nor shall be put out of his franchise or freehold, unless he be duly put to answer, and forejudged of the same by due course of law."[351] This was repeated in a short act of the twenty-eighth of his reign;[352] but both, in all probability, were treated with neglect; for another was passed some years afterwards, providing that no man shall be put to answer without presentment before justices, or matter of record, or by due process and writ original according to the old law of the land. The answer to the petition whereon this statute is grounded, in the parliament-roll, expressly declares this to be an article of the great charter.[353] Nothing, however, would prevail on the council to surrender so eminent a power, and, though usurped, yet of so long a continuance. Cases of arbitrary imprisonment frequently occurred, and were remonstrated against by the commons. The right of every freeman in that cardinal point was as undubitable, legally speaking, as at this day; but the courts of law were afraid to exercise their remedial functions in defiance of so powerful a tribunal. After the accession of the Lancastrian family, these, like other grievances, became rather less frequent but the commons remonstrate several times, even in the minority of Henry VI., against the council's interference in matters cognizable at common law.[354] In these later times the civil jurisdiction of the council was principally exercised in conjunction with the chancery, and accordingly they are generally named together in the complaint.