One of the first cases on record of a fraud on a very large scale cleverly planned and not less cleverly detected was the claim raised by a Lady Ivy, in 1684, to a large estate in Shadwell. It was based on deeds purporting to be drawn more than a hundred years previously, in the "2nd and 3rd Philip and Mary of 1555-6, under which deeds the lands had been granted to Lady Ivy's ancestors." The case was tried before the famous, or, more correctly, the infamous Judge Jeffreys, and the lawyers opposed to Lady Ivy proved that the deed put forward had been forged. It was discovered that the style and titles of the king and queen as they appeared in the deed were not those used by the sovereigns at that particular date. Always in the preambles of Acts of Parliament of 1555-6 Philip and Mary were styled "King and Queen of Naples, Princes of Spain and Sicily," not, as in the deed, "King and Queen of Spain and both the Sicilies." Again, in the deed Burgundy was put before Milan as a dukedom; in the Acts of Parliament it was just the reverse. That style did come in later, but the person drawing the deeds could not foretell it, and as a fair inference it was urged that the deeds were a forgery. Evidence was also adduced to show that Lady Ivy had forged other deeds, and it was so held by Judge Jeffreys: "If you produce deeds made in such a time when, say you, such titles were used, and they were not so used, that sheweth your deeds are counterfeit and forged and not true deeds. And there is _digitus Dei_, the finger of God in it, so that though the design be deep laid and the contrivance skulk, yet truth and justice will appear at one time or other." Accordingly, my Lady Ivy lost her verdict, and an information for forgery was laid against her, but with what result does not appear. A LAWYER TURNED DETECTIVE. Fifty years later a painstaking lawyer in Berkshire was able to unravel another case of fraud, which had eluded the imperfect police of the day. It was an artful attempt to claim restitution from a certain locality for a highway robbery said to have been committed within its boundaries: a robbery which had never occurred.