course or rules of the Roman Civil Law, or by those of the law or usage
of any of the inferior courts in Westminster Hall, but by the law and
usage of Parliament. And your Committee finds that this has been
declared in the most clear and explicit manner by the House of Lords, in
the year of our Lord 1387 and 1388, in the 11th year of King Richard II.

Upon an appeal in Parliament then depending against certain great
persons, peers and commoners, the said appeal was referred to the
Justices, and other learned persons of the law. "At which time," it is
said in the record, that "the Justices and Serjeants, and others the
learned in the Law Civil, were charged, by order of the King our
sovereign aforesaid, to give their faithful counsel to the Lords of the
Parliament concerning the due proceedings in the cause of the appeal
aforesaid. The which Justices, Serjeants, and the learned in the law of
the kingdom, and also the learned in the Law Civil, have taken the same
into deliberation, and have answered to the said Lords of Parliament,
that they had seen and well considered the tenor of the said appeal; and
they say that the same appeal was neither made nor pleaded according to
the order which the one law or the other requires. Upon which the said
Lords of Parliament have taken the same into deliberation and
consultation, and by the assent of our said Lord the King, and of their
common agreement, it was declared, that, in so high a crime as that
which is charged in this appeal, which touches the person of our lord
the King, and the state of the whole kingdom, perpetrated by persons who
are peers of the kingdom, along with others, the cause shall not be
tried in any other place but in Parliament, nor by any other law than
the law and course of Parliament; and that it belongeth to the Lords of
Parliament, and to their franchise and liberty by the ancient custom of
the Parliament, to be judges in such cases, and in these cases to judge
by the assent of the King; and thus it shall be done in this case, by