<P> A criticism of Chancery practice as it developed in the early medieval period was that it lacked fixed rules and that the Lord Chancellor was exercising an unbounded discretion . The counter-argument was that Equity mitigated the rigour of the common law by looking to substance rather than to form . </P> <P> Litigants would go' jurisdiction shopping' and often would seek an equitable injunction prohibiting the enforcement of a common law court order . The penalty for disobeying an equitable' common injunction' and enforcing a common law judgment was imprisonment . </P> <P> The Chief Justice of the King's Bench, Sir Edward Coke, began the practice of issuing writs of habeas corpus that required the release of people imprisoned for contempt of chancery orders . </P> <P> This tension climaxed in the Earl of Oxford's case (1615) where a judgment of Chief Justice Coke was allegedly obtained by fraud . The Lord Chancellor, Lord Ellesmere, issued a common injunction from the Chancery prohibiting the enforcement of the common law order . The two courts became locked in a stalemate, and the matter was eventually referred to the Attorney - General, Sir Francis Bacon . Sir Francis, by authority of King James I, upheld the use of the common injunction and concluded that in the event of any conflict between the common law and equity, equity would prevail . Equity's primacy in England was later enshrined in the Judicature Acts of the 1870s, which also served to fuse the courts of equity and the common law (although emphatically not the systems themselves) into one unified court system . </P>

The doctrine of equity and the substance of english common law