LAW AND LAWYERS.
(For the Mirror.)
William the Conqueror entertained the difficult project of totally abolishing the English language, and for that purpose, he ordered that in all schools throughout the kingdom, the youth should be instructed in the French tongue. Until the reign of Edward III. the pleadings in the supreme courts of judicature were performed in French, when it was appointed that the pleas should be pleaded in English; but that they should be entered or recorded in Latin. The deeds were drawn in the same language; the laws were composed in that idiom, and no other tongue was used at court. It became, says Hume, the language of all fashionable company; and the English themselves ashamed of their own country, affected to excel in that foreign dialect. At Athens, and even in France and England, formal and prepared pleadings were prohibited, and it was unlawful to amuse the court with long, artful harangues; only it was the settled custom here, in important matters, to begin the pleadings with a text out of the holy scriptures. It is of late years that eloquence was admitted to the bar.
The account which the learned judge Hale gives of the lawyers, who pleaded in the 15th century, does them little honour. He condemns the reports during the reigns of Henry IV. and V. as inferior to those of the last twelve years of Edward III. and he speaks but coolly of those which the reign of Henry VI. produces. Yet this deficiency of progressive improvement in the common law arose not from a want of application to the science; since we learn from Fortescue that there were no fewer than two thousand students attending on the inns of chancery and of court, in the time of its writer. Gray's-inn, in the time of Henry VIII. was so incommodious, that "the ancients of this house were necessitated to lodge double." Indeed until the beginning of the last century the lawyers lived mostly in their inns of court, or about Westminster-hall. But a great change has been effected; they are all now removed to higher ground, squares and genteel neighbourhoods, no matter how far distant from their chambers.
The number of judges in the courts of Westminster was by no means certain. Under Henry VI. there were at one time eight judges in the court of common pleas. Each judge took a solemn oath that "he would take no fee, pension, gift, reward, or bribe, from any suitor, saving meat and drink, which should be of no great value." In 1402, the salary of the chief justice of the king's bench was forty pounds per annum. In 1408, the chief justice of the common pleas had fifty-five marks per annum. In 1549, the chief justice of the king's bench had an addition of thirty pounds to his salary, and each justice of the same bench and common pleas, twenty pounds. At this time, a felony under the value of twelve pence, was not a capital offence; and twelve pence then was equal to sixty shillings at the present day.
To Richard III. on whom history has cast innumerable stains, England has considerable obligations as a legislator. Barrington thus speaks of him: "Not to mention his causing each act of parliament to be written in English and to be printed, he was the first prince on the English throne who enabled the justices of the peace to take bail; and he caused to be enacted a law against raising money by 'benevolence' which when pleaded by the citizens of London against Cardinal Wolsey, could only be answered by an averment, that Richard being a usurper and a murderer of his nephews, the laws of so wicked a man ought not to be forced." And a noble biographer, (Bacon's Henry VII.) says, "He was a good lawgiver for the ease and solace of the common people." Cardinal Wolsey to terrify the citizens of London into the general loan exacted in 1525, told them plainly, that it were better that some should suffer indigence than that the king at this time should lack, and therefore beware and resist not, nor ruffle not in the case, for it may fortune to cost some people their heads. And says Hume, when Henry VIII. heard that the commons made a great difficulty of granting the required supply, he was so provoked that he sent for Edward Montague, one of the members who had a considerable influence on the house; and he being introduced to his majesty, had the mortification to hear him speak in these words: Ho! man! will they not suffer my bill to pass? And laying his hand on Montague's head, who was then on his knees before him, get my bill passed by to-morrow, or else to-morrow this head of yours shall be off. This cavalier manner of Henry's succeeded; for next day the bill passed. Another instance of arbitrary power is worth relating. In Strype's life of Stow we find, a garden house belonging to an honest citizen of London, (which chanced to obstruct the improvement of a powerful favourite. Thomas Cromwell,) "loosed from the foundation, borne on rollers, and replaced two and twenty feet within the garden," without the owner's leave being required; nay without his knowledge. The persons employed, being asked their authority for this extraordinary proceeding, made only this reply, "That Sir Thomas Cromwell had commanded them to do it," and none durst argue the matter. The father of the antiquary, Stow, (for it was he that was thus trampled upon,) "was fain to continue to pay his old rent, without any abatement, for his garden; though half of it was in this manner taken away."