Shortly after the beginning of his reign in 1201, Duke Henry I the Bearded of Silesia confirmed the past acquisitions of two major Cistercian monasteries in his province—the houses of Lubiąż and Trzebnica—with three long charters in which he described and explained the past transfers of individual holdings to the abbeys, clarified doubts and controversies about them, and added endowment to the estates of each monastery. Both communities were endowed with wealthy areas of settlement and revenue that had prior to the creation of their estates been held under knightly, ducal, and ecclesiastical lordship.

The medieval English Court of Chancery is not a well-known institution. Its Victorian great-granddaughter—if to posit such a relationship does the antecedent justice—has a far broader public for its much darker persona, thanks to Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Even Chancery's Jacobean descendant looms larger in the historical memory than does its medieval forebear, if only for the celebrated battle between Chancellor Ellesmere and Coke, CJ. Perhaps with the brief tenure of St. Thomas More, brought into our own popular culture by playwright Robert Bolt and actor Paul Scofield, the early Chancery emerges for a moment, although the court under More was overshadowed by that chancellor's more difficult trials. In fact, the Chancery as a court has been subsumed in a multitude of studies on the Chancery as an administrative office. It appears in essays on government, councils and parliaments, writing offices and administrative centers. Yet the court that grew around the chancellor was not the sum, or even just a part, of his activity as the leading administrator of the realm. Still, with a few exceptions, the medieval Court of Chancery has never been afforded the same careful and discrete treatment its Elizabethan successor has received. The older court remains a footnote to administrative history, something just on the far side of the light cast by St German and Tudor records.

Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, provided the setting, in May 1912, for two widely publicized trials that highlighted the explosive fusion between race, gender, and class in early twentieth-century Canada. The prosecutions were based on a Saskatchewan statute passed several weeks earlier, “An Act to Prevent the Employment of Female Labour in Certain Capacities.” The first of its kind in Canada, this statute made it a criminal offence for “Chinese” men to employ “white” women. Quong Wing and Quong Sing, men who operated two restaurants and a rooming house in Moose Jaw's small but growing Chinatown, were charged with violating the new law. Between them, they employed three white women: Nellie Lane and Mabel Hopham as waitresses and Annie Hartman as a chambermaid.