For a half-century, historians, accepting an interpretation put forward by Francis Relf in the introduction to the Camden Society's publication of several of the scribbled books of Henry Elsing, clerk of the parliament in the 1620s, have viewed the revival of judicature in parliament in 1621 from the distorted framework of the struggle for supremacy between the two great systems of law in England. An explanation more consistent with all of the evidence surrounding this event - which brought with it the most significant constitutional develop ment in the house of lords since the middle ages - lies in the connection between slow process and due process in English justice. Professor William Jones singled out slow justice in the courts as the central judicial problem of the age and observed that it defeated both the great equity jurist, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, and his equally famous counterpart, Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, since ‘neither man could think of a remedy which would restrain litigants and yet leave their legally justified rights untarnished’. The revival of judicature in the house of lords in 1621, most especially in its appellate civil aspects, was part of the most ambitious attempt to solve this dilemma in the early seventeenth century. While it failed in its immediate goal and slow justice remained the nemesis of due process in the English legal system, the experiment begun in 1621 permanently altered the constitutional framework of England by establishing the house of lords once again as the high court of parliament.