A POINT OF LAW.
The High Court of Admiralty held its sittings at Doctors’ Commons, in both the Instance Court and the Prize Court, practically throughout the legal year, and so did the Ecclesiastical Courts. The Bankruptcy Court was in Basinghall Street; the Insolvent Debtors’ Court in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with an entrance from Portugal Street. There were then no County Courts. The ancient Hundred and County Courts, with their primitive procedure, had long been disused. Certain ‘Courts of Conscience’ or ‘Courts of Request’ had, it is true, been established for particular localities at the express request of the inhabitants, and these were still being constituted in some of the large towns. Then in London there were local Courts with a peculiar jurisdiction, such as the City Courts, which would fill a chapter by themselves, and of which it is enough to name the Lord Mayor’s Court, the Sheriff’s Courts of Poultry Compter and Giltspur Street Compter, both afterwards merged into the City of London Court. In Great Scotland Yard there was the Palace Court, with the Knight Marshal for judge, which anciently had exclusive jurisdiction in matters connected with the Royal Household, but now was a minor court of record for actions for debt within Westminster and twelve miles round. The Court had its own prison in High Street, Southwark—the Marshalsea of ‘Little Dorrit,’ not the old historic Marshalsea, which was demolished at the beginning of the century—that stood farther north, occupying the site of No. 119 High Street—but a new Marshalsea, built in 1811 on the site of the old White Lyon, once a hostelry, but since the end of the sixteenth century itself a prison. The Palace Court came to a sudden end in 1849, owing to ‘Jacob Omnium’ being sued in it. Thackeray tells the story in ‘Jacob Homnium’s Hoss:’—
Pore Jacob went to Court,
A Counsel for to fix.
And choose a barrister out of the four,
And an attorney of the six.
And there he sor these men of lor,
And watched them at their tricks.
* * * * *
O a weary day was that
For Jacob to go through;
The debt was two seventeen
(Which he no mor owed than you),
And then there was the plaintives costs,
Eleven pound six and two.
And then there was his own,
Which the lawyers they did fix
At the wery moderit figgar
Of ten pound one and six.
Now Evins bless the Pallis Court,
And all its bold ver-dicks!
The sittings of the Central Criminal Court, which was founded in 1834, were held, as they are still held, in the Sessions House in the Old Bailey. Rebuilt in 1809 on the site of the old Sessions House which was destroyed in the No-Popery riots of 1780, and of the old Surgeons’ Hall—where the bodies of the malefactors executed in Newgate were dissected—the building, although sufficiently commodious for holding the sessions of London and Middlesex, for which it was originally intended, as the centre of the criminal jurisdiction of the kingdom, was never anything but a makeshift. Since, however, its dingy Courts have remained the same down to our own times, we can the better realise the surroundings of the criminal trials of those days. It was here that Greenacre was tried in 1837. Bow Street was then in the zenith of its fame, and was practically the centre of the police arrangements of London.
MARSHALSEA—THE COURTYARD
Those were the palmy days of the Court of Chancery. Reform was, as it had been for centuries, in the air, and there, notwithstanding the efforts of Lord Lyndhurst, it seemed likely to remain. Practically nothing had been done to carry into effect the recommendations of the Commission of 1826. At the time of her Majesty’s accession there were nearly a thousand causes waiting to be heard by the Lord Chancellor, the Master of the Rolls, and the Vice-Chancellor of England. It was verily a ‘dead sea of stagnant litigation.’ ‘The load of business now before the Court,’ remarked Sir Lancelot Shadwell, ‘is so great that three angels could not get through it.’ Think what this meant! Many of these suits had endured for a quarter of a century, some for half a century; ‘the lawyers,’ to use the current, if incorrect, phrase of the time, ‘tossing the balls to each other.’ One septuagenarian suitor, goaded to madness by the ‘law’s delay,’ had, a few years before, thrust his way into the presence of Lord Eldon, and begged for a decision in a cause waiting for judgment which had been before the Court ever since the Lord Chancellor, then nearly eighty, was a schoolboy. Everyone remembers ‘Miss Flite,’ who expected a judgment—‘on the Day of Judgment,’ and Gridley ‘the man from Shropshire:’ both are true types of the Chancery suitors of fifty, thirty, twenty years ago. It would be wearisome indeed to detail the stages through which a Chancery suit dragged its slow length along. The ‘eternal’ bills, with which it began—and ended—cross bills, answers, interrogatories, replies, rejoinders, injunctions, decrees, references to masters, masters’ reports, exceptions to masters’ reports, were veritably ‘a mountain of costly nonsense.’ And when we remember that the intervals between the various stages were often measured by years—that every death made a bill of review, or, worse still, a supplemental suit, necessary—we can realise the magnitude of the evil. The mere comparison of the ‘bills’ in Chancery with the ‘bills of mortality’ shows that with proper management a suit need never have come to an end. There is a story for which the late Mr. Chitty is responsible, that an attorney on the marriage of his son handed him over a Chancery suit with some common law actions. A couple of years afterwards the son asked his father for some more business. ‘Why, I gave you that capital Chancery suit,’ replied his father; ‘what more can you want?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said the son; ‘but I have wound up the Chancery suit and given my client great satisfaction, and he is in possession of the estate.’ ‘What, you improvident fool!’ rejoined the father indignantly. ‘That suit was in my family for twenty-five years, and would have continued so for so much longer if I had kept it. I shall not encourage such a fellow.’