(La Farce de Maistre Pierre Patelin, Anon. 15 Cent.).
In the farce, a cloth merchant, who is suing his shepherd for stolen sheep, discovers also that the attorney on the other side is a man who had robbed him of some cloth. Dropping the charge against the shepherd, he begins accusing the lawyer of his offence; and, to recall him to the point, the judge impatiently interrupts him with Sus revenons à nos moutons, “Come, let us get back to our sheep.”
Compare Martial VI, 19: “My suit has nothing to do with assault, or battery, or poisoning, but is about three goats, which, I complain, have been stolen by my neighbour. This the judge desires to have proved to him; but you, with swelling words and extravagant gestures, dilate on the Battle of Cannae, the Mithridatic war, and the perjuries of the insensate Carthaginians, the Syllae, the Marii, and the Mucii. It is time, Postumus, to say something about my three goats.”
The reference to the French play I owe to King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations.
(The wife of a poor man deserted him for another man, and he married again. On being convicted for bigamy Mr. Justice Maule sentenced him as follows:) Prisoner at the bar: You have been convicted of the offence of bigamy, that is to say, of marrying a woman while you had a wife still alive, though it is true she has deserted you and is living in adultery with another man. You have, therefore, committed a crime against the laws of your country, and you have also acted under a very serious misapprehension of the course which you ought to have pursued. You should have gone to the ecclesiastical court and there obtained against your wife a decree a mensa et thoro. You should then have brought an action in the courts of common law and recovered, as no doubt you would have recovered, damages against your wife’s paramour. Armed with these decrees, you should have approached the legislature and obtained an Act of Parliament which would have rendered you free and legally competent to marry the person whom you have taken on yourself to marry with no such sanction. It is quite true that these proceedings would have cost you many hundreds of pounds, whereas you probably have not as many pence. But the law knows no distinction between rich and poor. The sentence of the court upon you, therefore, is that you be imprisoned for one day, which period has already been exceeded, as you have been in custody since the commencement of the assizes.
Sir W. H. Maule (1788-1858).
This fine piece of irony, well known to lawyers, materially helped to end the old bad state of the law of divorce. We need more men of the same stamp to draw attention to other abuses.