“’E towd me case wor on,” he said, pointing to the Plaintiff, “so I coom.”
I looked up matters and discovered that service of the summons was duly reported, and informed the Defendant, who seemed much relieved.
“You see,” he said, “I’m no scholard, and we got a paaper left at our ’ouse, and I took it up to Bill Thomas in our street, a mon as con read, an’ ’e looks at it, an’ says as ’ow may be it’s a coolvert paaper. ‘I’m not certain,’ ’e says, ‘but I think it’s a coolvert paaper.’ So I asks him what to do wi’ it, and he says, ‘Put a cross on it, and put it in a pillar box,’ and that wor done. But if you say it wor a summons, Bill must a bin wrong.”
One can gather something from this poor fellow’s difficulties of the trouble that a summons of any kind must cause in a domestic household, and one can only hope for the day when England will follow the example of other civilised countries and at least do away with the judgment summons and imprisonment for debt.
The hundred judgment summonses will have taken us until about eleven o’clock, and meanwhile in an adjoining Court the Registrar has been dealing with a list of about four hundred cases. The bulk of these are undefended, and the Registrar enters up judgment and makes orders against the Defendant to pay the debt by instalments at so much a month. A small percentage—say from five to ten per cent. of the cases—are sent across to the Judge’s Court for trial, and small knots of folk come into Court to take the seats vacated by the judgment debtors and wait for the trials to come on.
The trial of a County Court action on a black-letter day, where Plaintiff and Defendant appear in person, where neither understands law, evidence, or procedure, and where the main object of each party is to overwhelm his opponent by a reckless fire of irrelevant statements, is not easy to conduct with suavity and dignity. The chief object of a County Court Judge, as it seems to me—I speak from many years’ experience—should be to suffer fools gladly without betraying any suspicion that he considers himself wise. Ninety-nine per cent. of the cases are like recurring decimals. They have happened, and will happen again and again. The same defence is raised under the same circumstances. To the shallow-witted Defendant it is an inspiration of mendacity, to the Judge it is a commonplace and expected deceit. All prisoners in a Police Court who are found with stolen goods upon them tell you that they have bought them from a man whose name they do not know. There is no copyright in such a defence, and it sounds satisfactory to each succeeding publisher of it. No doubt it is disappointing to find that the judge and jury have heard it before and are not disposed to believe it. In the same way in the County Court there are certain lines of defence that I feel sure students of folk-lore could tell us were put forward beneath the oak trees when the Druids sat in County Courts in prehistoric times. The serious difficulty lies in continuing to believe that a Defendant may arise who actually has a defence, and in discovering and rescuing a specimen of a properly defended action from a crowded museum of antique mendacities. Counter-claims, for instance, which of course are only filed in the bigger cases, are very largely imaginative. The betting against a valid counter-claim must be at least ten to one. It is, of course, in finding the one that there is scope for ingenuity. It is the necessity for constant alertness that makes the work interesting.
The women are the best advocates. Here, for instance, is a case in point.
A woman Plaintiff with a shawl over her head comes into the box, and an elderly collier, the Defendant, is opposite to her. The action is brought for nine shillings. I ask her to state her case.
“I lent yon mon’s missus my mon’s Sunday trousers to pay ’is rent, an’ I want ’em back.”
That seems to me, as a matter of pleading, as crisp and sound as can be. If the trousers had been worth five hundred pounds, a barrister would have printed several pages of statement of claim over them, but could not have stated his case better. My sympathies are with the lady. I know well the kindness of the poor to each other, and, won by the businesslike statement of the case, I turn round to the Defendant and ask him why the trousers are not returned and what his defence may be.