There were then, as we have said, no County Courts. The Courts of Requests, of which there were not a hundred altogether, only had jurisdiction for the recovery of debts under 40_s._ We have already given an illustration of the methods of Palace Court, which may serve as a type of these minor courts of record. Indeed, with the exception of the City of London, which was before the times in this respect, there was throughout the kingdom a denial of justice. Those who could not afford to pay the Westminster price had to go without. For in those days all matters intended to be heard at the Assizes were in form prepared for trial at Westminster. The ‘record’ was delivered to the officers of the King’s Bench, Common Pleas, or Exchequer, and the cause was set down for trial at Westminster, _nisi prius_ in the meantime the judges happened to go on circuit into the county in which the cause of action arose,--in which event one of them would take down the record, try the action with a jury of the county, pronounce judgment according to the verdict, and bring back verdict and judgment, to be enrolled in due course at Westminster. In equity, things were even worse. There was, except in the counties palatine of Durham and Lancaster, no local equitable jurisdiction. And it was commonly said, and said with obvious truth, that no sum of less than 500_l._ was worth suing for or defending in the Court of Chancery. Divorce was then the ‘luxury of the wealthy.’ An action for the recovery of damages against the co-respondent, and a suit in the Ecclesiastical Courts for a separation ‘from bed and board,’ themselves both tedious and costly, after having been successfully prosecuted, had to be followed by a Divorce Bill, which had to pass through all its stages in both Lords and Commons, before a divorce _a vinculo matrimonii_ could be obtained. There is a hoary anecdote which usefully illustrates how this pressed upon the poor. ‘Prisoner at the bar,’ said a judge to a man who had just been convicted of bigamy, his wife having run away with another man, ‘the institutions of your country have provided you with a remedy. You should have sued the adulterer at the Assizes, and recovered a verdict against him, and then taken proceedings by your proctor in the Ecclesiastical Courts. After their successful termination you might have applied to Parliament for a Divorce Act, and your counsel would have been heard at the Bar of the House.’ ‘But, my lord,’ said the disconsolate bigamist, ‘I cannot afford to bring actions or obtain Acts of Parliament; I am only a very poor man.’ ‘Prisoner,’ rejoined the judge, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘it is the glory of the law of England that it knows no distinction between rich and poor.’ Yet it was not until twenty years after the Queen came to the throne that the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes was created.