She carefully looked up the nature of the Court of Dowry, and when she had learned all that she could learn from her books (it took her half a day—though she was a woman of exceptional intelligence and excellent education) she set herself to learn all that could be learned from living men.
The Court of Dowry, in its very survival and still more perhaps in the functions to-day attached to it, affords an admirable example of the value of fixed institutions in the life of a people.
It was originally instituted to try cases falling within the jurisdiction of that Queen Mother of the Middle Ages to whom the poet Gray so pathetically alludes in the striking lines
“She-wolf of France with unrelenting fangs
Tearing the bowels,” etc.
It had cognizance of all Escheats, Novels Tabulate and Malprisions Reguardaunt in the County of Ponthieu and the Seniory of Lucq. But when active jurisdiction over these continental territories was interrupted under King Henry VI., there remained no function for the Court but the trial of cases arising in or without foreign ports upon decks subject to the Crown of England.
It lingered thus into the beginning of the sixteenth century, at which moment it was reduced to a Clerk known as the Mangeur, and a Warden, each holding what were virtually sinecures (and not highly paid sinecures at that) about the Palace.
Henry VIII., whom we cannot call a good but whom surely we may call a great man, rudely suppressed the office of Mangeur with a cruel jest at the executioner’s expense, and only permitted the Wardenship itself to survive on the strict understanding that the salary should be paid to himself. The title, however, remained, a minor distinction among the numerous baubles of the time, and was, if I may so express it, resurrected from obscurity by the great family of Heygate at the moment of the Restoration of Charles II.
In their gladness at their recovery of a legitimate sovereign, this dominant house (now represented by the Parrells) trapped themselves in every accoutrement of joy, and, among other posts, the Wardenship of the Court of Dowry was voted in 1661 an annual salary of £2000, for which sum held by the same Act as an hereditary right, the head of the House of Heygate was content to license the annual holding of the Court within the Royal Manor and Liberties of Tooting.