No carrier with any horse or wagon or cart or drover with cattle may travel on Sunday or else forfeit 20s.
No butcher may kill or sell any victual on Sunday or else forfeit 6s.8d.
Every innkeeper, alehousekeeper, and other victualer permitting a patron who is not an inhabitant of the area to become drunk shall forfeit 5s. or be place in the stocks for six hours. Offenders convicted a second time shall be bound by two sureties to the sum of 200s.
As of 1627, a parent sending a child out of the country to go to a Catholic school was to forfeit 100 pounds, one half to the informer and one half to the king.
The Petition of Right herebefore described was passed as a statute in 1627.
Judicial Procedure
The Star Chamber decided cases as diverse as a case of subordination of witnesses, cases of counterfeiters of farthing tokens, and cases of apothecaries compounding ill medicines. It tried to keep down the prices of foodstuffs for the benefit of the poor; it repressed extortion and false accusations, and disbarred an attorney for sharp practices; it punished defamation, fraud, riots, forgery of wills; it forbade duels. A special virtue of its position was that it could handle without fear matters in which men of social or local influence might intimidate or overawe juries or even country justices. It punished a lord who caused records to be forged, unlawfully entered lands, and seized tithes. It disciplined a nobleman for drawing a sword on a lord hunting hare.
In one of its cases, Sir Edward Bullock, a knight wanting to enclose a common of a thousand acres threatened his neighbor Blackhall when he would not sell his lands and rights. The knight hired a man to break down the hedges and open a gate that had been staked up, so that his neighbor's cattle would stray. He sued his neighbor three times for trespass, lost his cases, and threatened revenge on all the witnesses who testified against him. He had the house of one pulled down. The pregnant wife and a naked child were turned out and had to lie in the streets because no one dared to take them in, even when a justice so directed. The witness, his wife, and family took refuge in an unheated outbuilding in the winter. He and his wife and one child died there. The knight had another witness cudgeled so that she was black and blue from the waist up, and could not put on her clothes for a month. The knight threatened to set fire to the house of another witness, and sent his men to pull him out of doors and keep him prisoner for some hours. The Star Chamber imprisoned the knight and his men. The knight was fined 1,000 pounds and the men 50 pounds each. The knight also had to pay one witness 100 pounds in reparation to the surviving children of the family whose house had been pulled down.
But the power of the Star Chamber was abused by King Charles I. For instance, one lord was accused by another of calling him a base lord. The evidence was paltry. But he was fined 8,000 pounds, one-half going to the King. A lord who was accused of converting agricultural land to pasture was fined 4,000 pounds. A person who exported fuller's earth, contrary to the King's proclamation, was pilloried and fined 2,000 pounds. A man who defaced a stained-glass window in a church was fined 500 pounds and ordered to pay for a plain glass replacement. A man who became sheriff of a county and had taken the oath which bound him to remain in the county was elected to Parliament and stood in opposition to the king on many matters. He was imprisoned for many years until he made a humble submission and had to pay a heavy fine. A London importer who was alleged to have said "That the Merchants are in no part of the world so screwed and wrung as in England; That in Turkey they have more encouragement" was fined 2,000 pounds for seditious and slanderous words against his majesty's happy government. A Scottish minister circulated a book appealing to Parliament to turn out the bishops and to resist its own dissolution by the King. In it he called the bishops men of blood, anti-Christian, satanical, ravens, and magpies, preying on the state. He was against kneeling at the sacrament and denounced the Queen for her Catholic religion. He blamed the state for the death of citizens of a certain town by famine. For as he did "scandalize his Majesties Sacred Person, his Religious, Wise, and just Government, the Person of his Royal Consort the Queen, the Persons of the Lords and Peers of this realm, especially the Reverend Bishops", he was fined 10,000 pounds, was to be unfrocked (which was done by the Court of High Commission), and was whipped, pilloried, one ear nailed to the pillory and cut off, his cheek branded, and his nose slit. Then he was imprisoned for life, but only served ten years, being released by a statute of the Long Parliament. A Puritan writer Pyrnne wrote a book that included a condemnation of masks and plays, and all who took part, and all who looked on as sinful, pernicious, and unlawful. It opined that Nero had attended plays and deserved to be murdered. Since Charles had attended plays and the Queen had taken part in a mask, it was inferred that Pyrnne meant them harm. His indictment alleged that "he hath presumed to cast aspersions upon the King, the Queen, and the Commonwealth, and endeavored to infuse an opinion onto the people that it is lawful to lay violent hands upon Princes that are either actors, favorers, or spectators of stage plays". The justices saw in the book an attempt to undermine authority. The Chief Justice called the book a most wicked, infamous, scandalous, and seditious libel. Pyrnne was sentenced to be degraded by Oxford and disbarred by Lincoln's Inn, to be fined 5,000 pounds, to be pilloried and to have his ears cut off, and then to be imprisoned for life. Three men who wrote attacks on the bishops and ecclesiastical courts, such as alleging that the bishops suppression of fasts and preaching had brought the pestilence upon the people and that the bishops had dishonored God and exercised papal jurisdiction in their own names, were each sentenced to 5,000 fine, the pillory, where their ears were cut off, and to life imprisonment. One, who had been convicted for libel before, was branded on both cheeks: "S.L." for Seditious Libeller. Others printed similar material. In vain the Star Chamber limited the number of London printers to twenty, and made licensing stricter. These prisoners were set free by the Long Parliament.
Charles I intimidated justices to obey him in decision-making even more than James I.