Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/536

 522 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY them by writ of error from the third. The House of Lords, in its turn, was the appointed Court of Error from the Exchequer Chamber. The modern system of appeal, ren- dered necessary in our day by the weakening of the Courts in Banc and the development of what has been called the single-judge system, had not yet come into existence. Nor, in truth, on the common law side of Westminster Hall was there any great necessity for it. The Queen's Bench, the Common Picas, and the Exchequer — whatever the imper- fection of the procedure — were great and powerful tri- bunals. In each of them sat a chief of mark, with three puisnes to assist him, and the weight of authority of four judges, amongst whom there could not well fail to be present one or more men of the first rank of intellect and experience, was sufficient as a rule to secure sound law and to satisfy the public. The prestige, again, of the Exchequer Chamber in such cases as were allowed to reach it upon error was of the highest order. But the principle upon which appeals were allowed by the law in some matters, and refused in others, was full of anomalies. Only matters of ' error ' which were apparent on the record could be the subject of a hear- ing in the Exchequer Chamber. No appeal lay on subjects so important as a motion for a new trial or to enter a verdict or a nonsuit — motions which proceeded on the assumption of miscarriages in law by the judge or the jury who tried the cause. If the aggrieved party had not succeeded in complying at the trial with the difficult formalities of the rule as to bills of exceptions — an old-fashioned and often impracticable method of challenging the direction of a judge — no review of it was possible. Error lay from a special verdict, where the parties had arranged, or the judge di- rected at the trial, a special statement of the facts. No error lay upon a special case framed without a trial by consent. That is to say, no appeal was permitted unless the expen- sive preliminary of a useless trial had first been thrown away. The technicalities which encumbered the procedure of the courts furnished one reason, no doubt, for the arrears which loaded the lists at the accession of her Majesty. Other accessory causes may be found in the survival till a late