Judgments in Vacation

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

It is in passages like these in the man’s own letters that his figure becomes dimly discernible to us across the ages of time, and when our eyes grow accustomed to the sight, we see before us the form of an Englishman not unlike many we have known in our own time. The more one studies the unaffected domestic documents of any period written without afterthought of publication, the more convinced one is that social progress moves like the tide and the rocks and the trees; its growth is nearly imperceptible, and four hundred years in the development of mankind is but a small moment of time.

The correspondence of William Fleetwood with Lord Burghley commences in 1575, when my Lord Burghley was at Buckestones—what a charming spelling of the prosaic Buxton—for his health. In those days an English Premier got rid of his gout in his own country, and knew not Homburg. The knowing ones in the political circles of London whispered with emphasis that the Prime Minister was “practising with the Queen of Scots,” then in custody at Sheffield, but the historical evidence points to mere gout.

Our Recorder, being Leicester’s creature, and being also a man of the world and looking for promotion as his deserts, writes careful reports to my Lord Burghley, telling him of London that from a police point of view “the state of the city is well and all quiet.” The Star Chamber had received the city fathers, and my Lord Keeper with the Chancellor of the Duchy, the Master of the Rolls and others had met the Recorder, and Master Nicholas the Lord Mayor, and divers Aldermen who had reported to them of city affairs. And as is the way of official men, they reported all to be well.

“And as,” writes the Recorder, “my Lord Keeper’s order is to call for the book of misbehaviours of masterless men, rogues, fencers, and such like, we had nothing to present for London, for Mr. Justice Southcot and I had taken fine of six strumpets such as haunt the hedge and which had lately been punished at the Assizes at Croydon, and two or three other lewd fellows, their companions, whom we despatched away into their countries. As for Westminster, the Duchy (the Savoy), St. Giles, High Holborn, St. John’s Street and Islington, (they) were never so well and quiet for neither rogue nor masterless man dare once to look into those parts.” Could Scotland Yard make a better report than that to-day? No doubt Fleetwood believed with the optimism of a modern Home Office official that he and his fellows had purged London of crime.

Crime being well in hand, these good men set out with feverish energy to put down the source of crime, and like the social reformer of to-day, thinking that pimples were the origin of disease rather than mere evidence of a disordered system, commenced a crusade on the alehouse.

One is apt to think of the Star Chamber as merely a Court for the oppression of English freedom and the abolition of Magna Charta, but in Elizabeth’s day it was busying itself with much the same problems that are troubling Parliament and the magistrates to-day. It is very modern reading to learn that my Lord Keeper and the residue of the Council at the Star Chamber have set down in writing certain orders for the reforming of certain matters, and that the very first of these is “for the suppressing of the over great number of alehouses, the which thing upon Wednesday last my Lord Mayor, Sir Rowland Hayward and myself for the liberties of Southwark, and Mr. Justice Southcot and myself for Lambeth town, Lambeth Marsh, the Mint, the Bank, Parr’s Garden, the Overground, Newington, Bermondsey Street and Kentish Street, sitting altogether, we have put down, I am certain, above two hundred alehouses and yet have left a sufficient number, yea, and more, I fear than my Lord Keeper will well like of at his next coming.”

All this was done on Wednesday and Thursday, and on Wednesday there was an influential dinner party at Mr. Campion, the brewer’s—one wonders if he owned tied houses in those days and whether their licenses were spared—and “at after dinner, Mr. Deane and I went to Westminster, and there in the Court we had before us all the officers of the Duchy and of Westminster, and there we have put down nearly an hundred alehouses. As for St. Giles, High Holborn, St. John Street, and Islington, Mr. Randall and I mean this Saturday at afternoon to see the reformation, in like manner Mr. Lieutenant and Mr. Fisher deal for the East part. I am sure they will use great diligence in this matter.”

One may piously hope that the souls of these good men are not vexed to-day with the knowledge of the futility of their work on earth and that they know nothing of our modern licensing system. Could Master Fleetwood return to listen to the procedure of a local licensing bench in the twentieth century he would perhaps laugh in his sleeve to think that the methods of the Star Chamber were yet with us and that magistrates of austere mind were still using “great diligence in these matters.”

Fleetwood’s earliest letter is dated from Bacon House, August 8th, 1575. The vacation is on, yet it seems the Temple is full of students. For as Richard Chamberlayne tells us this is the “second learning vacation” which began on Lammas Day. Readings continued for “three weeks and three days,” and the Recorder seems to think my Lord Burghley would take an interest in the matter of legal education, which is not an affair that has troubled the mind of any minister of modern times. The plague is with them and the study of the law has to give way to the plague, for the Recorder tells us that “as touching the Inns of Court it so fell out that at Gray’s Inn there was no reading this vacation because one died there of the plague. At the Inner Temple there hath been a meeting, but by means that the plague was in the house, the reading being scarce half done, is now broken up. In Lincoln’s Inn yesterday being Friday, at afternoon one is dead of the plague and the company are now to be dispersed. In the Middle Temple, where I am, I thank God we have our health and our reading continually. I am always at the reading, and I have taken stringent order upon the pain of putting out of commons, that none of the Gentlemen of our house or their servants shall go out of the house except it be by water and not to come in any place of danger, the which order is well observed.”

“Our house” is the old world phrase familiar to Templars and means the Middle Temple, and “putting out of commons” was in that day a serious penalty. The “readings” took the form of “moots” or arguments on a case put by the reader, and argued not only by students but by lawyers of position. They must have been of considerable educational value and have always been prized by the older generation of lawyers. I remember well an old learned Judge solemnly exhorting me in the days of my youth, to become a good “put-case,” a phrase which one does not hear used nowadays. Moots and readings might, one would think, be revived especially in the interest of the newly called barrister, who can say with but too much truth as Fleetwood wrote in August, 1575, “For my own part I have no business but go as quietly to my book as I did the first year that I came to the Temple.”