in Chancery were, too, in those days almost as important functionaries as the judges themselves. Judges’ Chambers were not then in existence, and much of the work which now comes before the judges was disposed of by a master, as well as such business as the investigation of titles, the taking of accounts, and the purely administrative functions of the Court. All these duties they discharged with closed doors and free from any supervision worth talking about. They, too, were paid by fees, their receipts amounting to an immense sum, and it was to them that the expense of proceedings was largely due. The agitation for their abolition, although not crowned with success until fifteen years later, was in full blast fifty years ago. At law, matters were little better. ‘Justice was strangled in the nets of form.’ The Courts of King’s Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer were not only at conflict with Equity, but in a lesser degree with each other. The old fictions by which they ousted each other’s jurisdiction lasted down to 1831, when, by statute, a uniformity of process was established. It seems nowadays to savour of the Middle Ages, that in order to bring an action in the King’s Bench it should have been necessary for the writ to describe the cause of action to be ‘trespass,’ and then to mention the real cause of action in an _ac etiam_ clause. The reason for this absurd formality was that, ‘trespass’ still being an offence of a criminal nature, the defendant was constructively in the custody of the Marshal of the Marshalsea, and therefore within the jurisdiction of the King’s Bench. In the same way a civil matter was brought before the Court of Exchequer by the pretence that the plaintiff was a debtor to the King, and was less able to pay by reason of the defendant’s conduct. The statement, although in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred a mere fiction, was not allowed to be contradicted. But the fact that the jurisdiction of the Court of Common Pleas was thus entrenched upon was less serious than it might have been, since in that court the serjeants still had exclusive audience; and, distinguished as were the members of the Order of the Coif, it is easy to understand that the public preferred to have their pick of the Bar.