Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/486

 472 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY attacking the length of legal documents (" the round-about, Robin-Hood circumstances, with * saids ' and ' af oresaids,' " the " huge gaps, wide as meridians in maps," the reckoning fifteen or eighteen lines to a folio) as an absolute evil, at- tacked it also as profitable to the lawyers ; the answer, that lawyers must be properly paid, indirectly if not directly, was old as Bacon. ^ On the whole, though some of the reforms were tacitly adopted by Clarendon, they were not enough; and the best thing which the Commonwealth did for Equity was, not to fuse it with — T find no notion of fusing, but to reduce it to. Common Law. That it did by placing on the Equity Bench Common-lawyers whose political career had made them acquainted with the defects of their own school, and whose antecedents had disposed them to find in Equity one of the grounds of Common Law, to study it as a science, and administer it regularly.^ That view, so rational, so true to history, reconciling Coke and Selden with Bacon, EUesmere and Hobbes, inherited from Hale by Nottingham, has descended through Camden and Eldon, and, if now out of date, was suited to England in the seventeenth century. England needed Equity, and yet that Equity should cease to be " mysterious," and " the measure of the Chancellor's foot." 3 A series of statutes professed to take away all " ordinary jurisdiction," * and, no doubt, from spiritual persons, took it and every privilege away. The Courts Christian had long been doomed. They remind those whose hatred of the episcopate had led them to fix on spotted dogs the name of " bishop " that prelacy had been in the ascendant : * » Carey, "The present state of England" (1627): "Saint Hilary's tears" (1642 or 1643): 2 " Hudibras " 3, 325-30, and Grey's n.: Bacon, "Arguments against the Bill of Sheets" ["Works," vol. 10, p. 287 (ed. Spedding), cp. vol. 8, p. 226]: Williams, "Real Property," pt. 1, c. 9. P. 9] and Hobbes, " A dialogue between a philosopher and a student of the Common Laws of Engl." And see Smith, 1 Ex. Dev. 534 n. t. (1844); 2 Swanston, 414; 3 De G. F. and J. 238; Best, 1 Jur. Soc Pap. 399, foil. ; Marshall, ih., 2, 283, foil. ♦Stt. 16 Car. i. c. 11; 17 Car. i. c. 28 (repealed by 13 Car. ii. c. 2); 1646, cc. 64, 66; 1649, c. 24: Clar. bks. 3, 4. »1 "Hudibras" 2, 531; 3, 2, 544; and Grey's notes.
 * "A noble person," in Burnet's "Hale," pp. 113 foil. (1682).
 * Cp. Selden, "Table Talk" and Whitelock, 378, with Hooker [5E.