Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/687

 19. ZANE: THE FIVE AGES 673 the table) in the great hall of Melton Roos, history has not told us. But an archbishop who could prescribe a feast and two hogsheads of wine as a peace offering certainly can- not be accused of any prejudice in favor of sobriety.^ This was the age of noted lawyers. Such names as Hank- ford, Markham and Danby, Norton, Prisot, Hody, Moyle, Choke and Brian are great names in the Year Books. Hody, according to Coke, was " one of the famous and expert sages of the law." He and Prisot, a Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, are said to have greatly assisted Littleton in writing his work on Tenures. Hody tried and condemned Roger Bolingbroke, " a gret and konnyng man in astronomye," for attempting " to consume the king's person by way of nygromancie." The unfortunate scientist was sentenced to death and executed. Markham furnishes the first instance, for generations, of the removal of a judge for an unsatis- factory decision. It happened in this wise: Sir Thomas Cooke, lately Lord Mayor of London, was possessed of vast landed wealth. The Yorkists in 1469 brought him to trial for loaning money to Margaret of Anjou, the wife of the deposed king, Henry VI. The cormorants surrounding Ed- ward IV., the hungry relatives of his wife, had condemned Cooke beforehand and considered his estate as their lawful prey. But Markham charged the jury that the act proven was merely misprision of treason, and thus the Lord Mayor was saved from forfeiture of his estate. Markham was immediately superseded as Chief Justice. Another name celebrated in the Year Books is that of Skrene. He Is a favorite with the reporters, for many of his deliverances are noted with the same approval as those of the judges. In later times such men as Coke deemed all statements of law as of equal value, and cited indiscriminately the arguments of counsel and the words of the judges, as en- titled to equal credit. Skrene never attained a judicial posi- tion, but he left a fine estate called Skrenes which was many years afterwards purchased by Chief Justice Brampston. • The grandson of a noted lawyer of that time, by name Rede, after- wards endowed Jesus College at Oxford with a fellowship and a brew- cry. The brewery for the use of undergraduates is a startling commen- tary on our Puritanical practices.