Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/537

 16. BOWEN: THE VICTORIAN PERIOD 523 date of the old-fashioned term of three weeks, recurring four times a year, at the end of which the courts ceased sitting to decide purely legal questions while the three chiefs repaired to jury trials at Nisi Prius. It was not till after the beginning of the reign that an Act of Parliament was passed which enabled the Queen's Bench, the Common Pleas, and the Exchequer to dispose in Banc sittings after term of business left unfinished on their hands. Under the old system, the last day of term was famous for the crowd of counsel and of solicitors solely intent upon having their pending rules ' enlarged,' or, in other words, adjourned till term should again begin. The Queen's counsel in the front benches spent the day in obtaining the formal leave of the court to this facile process, and in marking each brief in turn with a large ' E ' as the token of a regular ' enlarge- ment.' * How do you manage to get through your business in the Queen's Bench? " said a spectator to the late Sir Frederick Thesiger (afterwards Lord Chelmsford). ' We find no difficulty,' said the eniinent counsel ; * we do it always with great Ease.' At the beginning of 1837, the accu- mulation of arrears in the Queen's Bench, to which court the great bulk of business necessarily drifted, had been most formidable. Three hundred cases of various descriptions were waiting for argument in Banc. The Law Magazine of two years later still complained, in its notice of the cur- rent events of the quarter, that the Banc arrears had reached to such a pass that a rule nisi for a new trial could not in all probability be disposed of under two years and a half from the time of granting it, at the end of which time, if the application were even granted, the cause would still have to be reheard. The Court of Chancery was both a judicial tribunal and an executive department of justice for the protection and administration of property, but the machinery that it em- ployed for the two purposes was, unfortunately, not kept distinct. Its procedure in contentious business served as the basis of its administrative operations, and persons between whom there was no dispute of fact at all found themselves involved in the delays and the embarrassments of a needless