Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/709

 19. ZANE: THE FIVE AGES 695 attempted to convert every use or trust in land into a legal estate in the beneficiary ; this was followed by the Statute of Enrollments requiring all conveyances of freehold by bargain and sale to be recorded in a public office. But the chancery judges and lawyers soon " drove a coach and four " through this act of Parliament ; and by means of a bargain and sale for a lease, which the statute executed, followed by a release, which did not require recording, they abolished livery of seisin, as well as the recording of deeds. The Statute of Uses also abolished all uses to be declared by the feoffor's will. The uses declared in the will had been sedulously protected by the chancery court. But when this method of devising lands was abolished by the Statute of Uses, it became necessary to pass the Statute of Wills. Both Coke and Bacon thought that the Statute of Uses abohshed all devises except those that would have been good at common law as conveyances. But the statute was construed other- wise, and the chancery lawyers imported into wills all thes» conveyances to uses, and thus let in the various kinds of executory devises — estates that in wills rendered nugatory all the common law rules as to remainders. All this history shows the futility of attempting to control a natural devel- opment, by means of statutes. In many ways the years of the first two Stuart kings are the saddest in the history of the law. The servility of the judges was no less marked than under the Tudors. As an added evil, judicial offices were openly made the subject of bargain and sale. Henry Montague gave to Buckingham's nominee the clerkship of the court, worth four thousand pounds a year.^ Coventry paid Coke two thousand angels for his influence in securing a judicial appointment. The chiefship of the Common Pleas cost Richardson seventeen thousand pounds. Sir Charles Caesar paid fifteen thousand pounds for the mastership of the rolls. Henry Yelverton gave the King four thousand pounds for the office of attorney-general, — a place for which Ley, afterwards Chief ' Perhaps we ourselves have as yet no rief-ht to condemn this, when we still see in some regions masterships in chancery turned over to the successful political party to be filled.