Chamber (pronounced cheym-ber)
(1) A room, usually private, in a house or apartment, especially a bedroom (now archaic or poetic).
(2) A reception room or audience room in an official residence, palace, etc.
(3) The meeting hall of a legislative or other assembly.
(4) In law, a place where a judge hears matters not requiring action in open court.
(5) In England, the quarters or rooms that lawyers use to consult with their clients, especially in the Inns of Court.
(6) A legislative, judicial, or other like body.
(7) An organization of individuals or companies for a specified purpose.
(8) The place where the moneys due a government are received and kept; a treasury or chamberlain's office (obsolete).
(9) As chamberlet, a small chamber.
(10) Of or relating to, or performing chamber music.
(11) To put or enclose in, or as in, a chamber.
(12) To provide with a chamber.
(13) The space between two gates of the locks of a canal, dry dock, etc
(14) An enclosure for a cartridge in the cylinder of a revolver or for a shell in the breech of a cannon.
(15) An enclosed space, compartment or cavity; the smallest chamber in a cave.
1175-1225: From the Middle English chamber (a room in a (usually private) house) from the eleventh century Old French chambre (room, chamber, apartment), derived from the Late Latin camera (a chamber, room), variant of camara (vaulted room) from the Ancient Greek kamára. In an interesting linguistic twist, the Old French and Middle English words were also used alone and in combinations to form words for "latrine, privy" from the idea of the "bedroom utensil for containing urine". The word in the fourteenth century was adopted for use in to anatomy in the sense of "an enclosed space in a body" and this was extended to machinery after 1769, the use in gunnery or ballistics meaning "part of the bore in which the charge is placed" dating from the 1620s. The familiar use to refer to the rooms where legislative bodies assemble (ie upper & lower chambers) has been in use since circa 1400. Chamber music dates from 1789; the distinction being it described a type of music meant to be performed in private rooms instead of public halls. Chamber-lye, disturbingly to modern ears, meant "urine used as a detergent" and dates from the 1570s and the obviously related chamber-pot (also chamberpot) (vessel for urine used in bedrooms) came into use a decade earlier. A chambermaid was (1) a female servant who dresses a lady and waits on her in her bedchamber and (2) a woman who makes beds and cleans rooms in a private house, palace or inn, a form which emerged in the 1580s and obviously derived from bedchamber (also bed-chamber) (a room for sleep or repose) which had been in use since the mid-fourteenth century. Bedchamber is now archaic and used only in relation to royalty (an then mostly in historic reference), expensive hotels and hopeful real-estate salespeople. The verb chamber was in the late fourteenth century derived from the noun and was used in the sense of (1) to restrain, shut up as in a chamber and (2) to furnish with a chamber" (implied in chambered); the related form was chambering. The adjective chambered (divided into chambers) was from the same era and was the past-participle adjective the verb. The famous reference to nautilus shells dates from 1819. Chamber & chambering are nouns & verbs, chamberful & chamberer are nouns, chambered is a verb & adjective, chamberless & chamberlike are adjectives; the noun plural is chambers.
In an ICE (internal combustion engine), the combustion chamber is the (temporarily) sealed space in which a quantity of fuel and air is compressed and then ignited (ie the mix is combusted), the energy released moving a piston or rotor, that energy subsequently transferred by a series of mechanical connections so the movement (transferred energy) can be applied to some purpose. All else being equal, the larger the chamber and the more of them, the more energy can be produced, expressed usually as power or torque. In an ICE, these ignitions happen thousands of times a second so the transfer of energy from the fuel to a mechanical action can be considerable. Combustion chamber design has for well over a century occupied the time of engineers and a number of “standard types” emerged including the “wedge”, “hemi” “poly” and “swirl”. For those designing a device for a single purpose the task can be a relatively simple quest for optimal efficiency (for short-duration purposes such as drag or sprint racing when all that matters is power & torque) whereas if there are a number of parameters it’s a matter of balancing out competing specific efficiencies (in endurance racing, economy matters as well as power & torque). In mass production units for general sale, as well as striking a balance between output and economy, engineers also have to factor in the cost & ease of manufacture as well as (for the last 60-odd years) the toxicity of emissions.
Smith & Wesson Model 648 .22 WMR Revolver. In a revolver, the bullets are housed in chambers (typically between 5 & 10) in the revolving cylinder.
Popular in the “female market” (in the US, a sector for some years exhibiting consistent growth) and something of a “sweet spot” for small-game-hunting and plinking (recreational target shooting), the .22 Magnum cartridge is suitable for use in both handguns and long-arms; inherently an accurate cartridge, the ballistics out of a 6-inch (150 mm) barrel handgun are at least equal to those of a 22 LR out of a 24-inch (610 mm) barrel rifle. Smith & Wesson’s 648 was produced in runs between 1989-1996 and 2003-2005 and the re-introduction in 2020 was much welcomed. The most recent edition uses a stainless steel version of S&W’s 6-inch K-Frame barrel with an 8-chamber cylinder.
The Court of Star Chamber
Procedurally the Star Chamber would begin a case with a petition or with information brought to the attention of the judges and depositions would be taken to discover the facts. Accused parties could be put on oath to respond to the charges and answer detailed questions. No juries were used; members of the court decided whether to hear cases, passed verdicts and assigned punishments. Structurally, the court was thus a hybrid with influences from the common law, Roman civil law, developments in Chancery (equity) law and the Court of Exchequer. Interestingly, the court did not have capital jurisdiction so instead declared its choice of punishment was wholly arbitrary and not at all governed by precedent, guidelines or laws, judges able to choose (indeed even invent) the punishment(s) they felt most appropriate to the crime or criminal and on the bench there were some imaginative folk. The sentences handed down included fines, time in the pillory (stocks), whipping, branding, mutilation or imprisonment for any length of time. In Australia, there are critics of the NSW (New South Wales) ICAC (Independent Commission against corruption) who compare its operations with the Star Chamber; in this they’re only partially correct in that there are some procedural similarities but the comparison is not valid regarding punishments.
The Star Chamber offered an expeditious resolution to legal conflicts. It was popular with the Tudors because quickly it could enforce the law (or the will of the king when the letter of the law proved tiresome) when other courts were slow or tainted by corruption. In royal circles it was valued because it could be relied upon to deliver "satisfactory remedies" in cases where the common law restricted punishments able to be inflicted or failed to address specific infractions. These days, some might call it "judicially efficient". Under the Tudors, Star Chamber hearings were held in public, proceedings and verdicts subject to inspection, that alone inducing most judges to act with reason and try to deliver fair justice; it was in the seventeenth century, the court evolved into something secretive and corrupt, the Stuarts using the court to enforce their royal proclamations (ancestor of the "executive order" now much associated with the White House), holding sessions in secret and allowing no appeals. Charles I (1600–1649; King of England, Scotland, and Ireland 1625-1649) saw the court as a substitute for Parliament when he tried to govern without calling the legislature into session and resentment grew as the Stuarts used the court to prosecute members of the nobility who otherwise would not be subject to prosecution in common-law courts. The Long Parliament in 1641 abolished the Star Chamber and, except in historic references, the term "star chamber" is now almost always pejorative and used to describe social and political oppression through the arbitrary use and abuse of the powers wielded (in political science, the doctrine of separation of powers is held to be the most effective means to prevent abuse of power by the state; at its most simple, it means the executive can no longer in individual cases impose the sanctions of criminal law, a function belonging exclusively to the courts. The verbal shorthand for the concept is "judicial independence".
Not often was the Court of Star Chamber a cause for mirth but William Shakespeare (1564–1616) found a way in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), Justice Shallow in Act 1, Scene 1 saying: “Sir Hugh, persuade me not; I will make a Star-chamber matter of it: if he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, esquire.” The context was the carefully named Justice Shallow, an arrogant, pompous provincial magistrate from Gloucestershire, was furious because Sir John Falstaff and his followers had insulted and robbed him and his cousin. That this petty crime was not the sort of thing to come before the Star Chamber was the joke, showing Shallow’s puffed-up sense of self-importance and legal pedantry. The Court of Star Chamber was a classic example of an institution that “seemed a good idea at the time” that came, through a process of “mission creep” later to be "re-purposed" and misused to the extent it became something worse than the problems it was created to solve. The early records are sketchy so the origins are obscure but the critical point was that despite the creation of several layers of courts and the evolution of the English common law, no sovereign ever surrendered their “supreme jurisdiction” and by the thirteenth century, when sessions of the King's Council became regular (and functionally distinct from parliament), this residual supreme jurisdiction continued to be exercised by the King in council. What happened was that as the common law administered by the courts introduced (by the operation of precedent) a certain predictability, the more erratic judgments handed down by the council (a body with unlimited jurisdiction) resulted in an increasing volume of complaints but, such was the state of constitutional development (essentially the balance of power between the king and parliament), successive parliaments had little success in effecting reforms.
As late as the nineteenth century, historians were still writing of the Star Chamber (after operating for a half-century odd) “ceasing to exist” towards the end of the reign of Henry VIII (1491–1547; King of England (and Ireland after 1541) 1509-1547) with the court’s powers reverting to the Council. The extant records are contradictory but whatever the terminology used, it would seem a deliberative body at least “Star Chamber-like” sat concurrently with the Council and, by whatever processes, the two bodies were again separate institutions late in the reign of Elizabeth I (1533–1603; Queen of England & Ireland 1558-1603). The murkiness seems to stem from the Act of 1540 including the phrase “in the Star Chamber or elsewhere” and this may explain why it became difficult to determine a clear distinction between the duties of the Privy Council and those of the Star Chamber; essentially, it wasn’t clear in what capacity members were sitting and there’s little to suggest they made jurisdictional distinctions.
The uncertainty is illustrated in the writings of eminent jurist Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634 Chief Justice of the King's Bench 1613–1616) who observed the Star Chamber “is (or may be) compounded of three several councils: (1) the Lords and others of the Privy Council; (2) the judges of either bench and the barons of the Exchequer; (3) the Lords of Parliament, who are not, however, standing judges of the court.” Sir Edward usually is regarded as authoritative but William Hudson (circa 1577-1935), an advocate who practiced before the court, in 1621 claimed all peers had the right of sitting in the court and it’s not clear when that right was extinguished but definitely the privilege did not exist late in the seventeenth century. Hudson’s Treatise of the court of Star Chamber (1621) was a quite strident defence of the Star Chamber, a response to complaints about the body’s haphazard ways with the records of pleadings and judgements. Critics compared the court’s inconsistent, unstructured approach with the at least semi-codified methods by then adopted by Westminster’s other courts and found a “lack of diligence”, claiming the Star Chamber was no “settled, ordinary court of justice”, nor a “court of ordinary justice ever tied to form” but effectively “a committee for such great causes as it pleased the king”. Hudson did not deny the administrative neglect but observed it was something new, the court in former times a model of record-keeping. By the time Parliament abolished the Star Chamber, one of the distinctions MPs drew between it and what they deemed the “ordinary, legitimate courts of common law” was precisely that the former had no proper record whereas the latter did.
That grumble really was a product of how “records” was defined. The court produced an abundance of material, just not in the predictable, structured form used by other courts, a form that would come to be accepted as the proceedings of a “court of record” (ancestor of the modern law report). If judged by volume alone, the Star Chamber certainly was productive, its documents including lengthy bills in the form of petitions through to rejoinders, demurrers, interrogatories, and depositions. In a modern phrase, that was "a lot of data but not much information", lawyers finding it difficult to “mine” all this stuff for findings or facts, let alone incontrovertible determinations. As an outgrowth of the authority of the sovereign, the jurisdiction of the Star Chamber was as vague as its constitution, Hudson making the point it was “impossible to define” without offending the supporters of “the prerogative” by a limitation of its powers, or the advocates by attributing to it “an excessive latitude”. Given that, it’s hardly surprising the jurisdiction remained effectively close to unlimited and the vista was extraordinary, encompassing from time-to-time riots, murder, forgery, felony, perjury, fraud, libel and slander, duels and acts tending to treason, as well as of some civil matters, such as disputes about land between great men and corporations, disputes between English and foreign merchants, and testamentary cases. It can be understood only as analogous to a delegation of the powers of an absolute monarch dispensing justice from his throne and that was of course the body's medieval root. As Hudson put it: “All offences may be here examined and punished if the King will.” Not constrained by the limitations and guideposts of the common law, Hudson’s critique was summed-up by a later reviewer as: “Its procedure was not according to the Common Law; it dispensed with the encumbrance of a jury; it could proceed on rumour alone; it could apply torture; it could inflict any penalty but death.”
The paradox of such an institution was that it was thus “admirably calculated to be the support of order against anarchy, or of despotism against individual and national liberty.” So it proved, operating in the former light under the Stuarts and in the latter under the Tudors, shifting from “a tribunal constantly resorted to as a resource against the ignorance or prejudices of a country jury” where, in such investigations “it showed itself intelligent and impartial.” Under the Stuarts, the Star Chamber became “the great engine of the royal tyranny” with “hateful and excessive punishments inflicted on those brought it judges”. Amusingly, despite that perception, even as late as 1629 the Barons of the Exchequer felt moved to observe the Star Chamber was “one of the most high and honourable courts of justice.” Although in 1641 abolished by an act of parliament, twenty years later the "gap in the judicial market" was considered by a committee of the House of Lords, their lordships reporting “that it was fit for the good of the nation that there be a court of like nature to the Star Chamber.” The mood had however shifted and the matter wasn’t pursued.
No comments:
Post a Comment