Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/667

 19. ZANE: THE FIVE AGES 653 Metingham. He was also a legal author. His treatise was a work on the method of conducting actions, divided into Magnum and Parvum. His predecessor in the King's Bench, Thornton, had written an abridgment of Bracton. Britton and Fleta belong very close to this period, and it is plain that there was a demand for law books. Hengham is a great authority on writs, and issues instructions to the clerks from the bench. He sometimes delivers long dicta, but the re- porter adds in one case that Hengham is wrong. He was firm with the lawyers. In one case he said to Friskeney and his associates : " We forbid you to speak further of that averment on pain of suspension," and, adds the reporter, " they obeyed." Sometimes Hengham lost his judicial poise, as when he says to pertinacious counsel : " Leave off your noise, and deliver yourself from this account." One of his rebukes is on a much higher plane. To a lawyer who offered a plausible but unsound argument Hengham said : " That is a sophistry, and this place is designed for truth." But the greatest character on the bench is William de Bereford, who succeeded Hengham as Chief Justice of the Common Bench. He served thirty-four years as a judge. We can sit in court and hear Bereford's oaths, " By God " and " By Saint Peter." He says to an absurd plea : " In God's name, now, this is good ! " One day he was sitting with Mutford and Stonor, associate judges. Stonor held a hvely debate with counsel. Mutford then said : " Some of you have said a good deal that runs counter to what has hitherto been accepted as law." " Yes," interjected Bere- ford, " that is very true and I won't say who they are." The reporter naively adds, " Some thought he meant Stonor." Bereford is sometimes cutting to counsel : " We wish to know," he once exclaimed, " whether you have anything else to say, for as yet you have done nothing but wrangle and chatter." One day Serjeant Westcote disputed Bereford's law: "Really," Bereford sarcastically rejoined, "I am much obliged to you for the challenge, not for the sake of us who sit on the bench, but for the sake of the young men who are here." He despised the ridiculous Anglo-Saxon wager of law. " Now God forbid," he