The first branch of the English government to reach a high point of development was that which dealt with the administration of justice; and it is here that we first see the coöperation of professional and lay elements. They appear in the form of judge and jury; and in that form they have worked together from the Middle Ages to the present day. The judge, a royal officer of high rank, supplies the expert knowledge, while the lay influence is exerted by means of a panel of twelve men of average ignorance, drawn from the community by lot for the occasion; and although this is not the usual method of combining the two elements, their reciprocal control has certainly been effective. [Sidenote: The Justice of the Peace and his Clerk.] It was not, however, in the superior courts of law alone that the principle made itself felt. Its working, if less evident on the surface, may be traced no less clearly in the exercise of petty jurisdiction by the justices of the peace sitting without a jury. But here the mutual relation of the two elements was reversed. The justice of the peace was in most cases a landowner, a country gentleman, not skilled in law. In the earlier period the commission included a number of trained lawyers, who were said to be of the quorum, because without the presence of one of them the justices were not by law competent to act.[174:1] But in process of time the trained lawyers ceased to be appointed, while the names of almost all the justices came to be inserted in the quorum clause;[174:2] and thus it happened that judicial authority was vested in a squire who knew little of the law he was called upon to administer. But the justice supplied, in fact, the lay, not the professional, element in his own court; the requisite legal knowledge being usually furnished by his clerk, who was learned in the law; or, at least, learned in the duties of the justice of the peace as set forth in the statutes and in the manuals published for the purpose. The office of clerk of the peace for the county must be of considerable age, for it is referred to in a statute of Richard II. in 1388.[174:3] But besides this office, which is a public one, it has been the habit time out of memory for an active justice to retain a private clerk of his own to assist him when acting as a single magistrate; such a clerk being paid partly out of the justice's pocket, partly from the fees that accrued.[175:1] [Sidenote: As Portrayed in Literature.] More important than the age of these offices is the question of the real power exerted by their holders. That the influence of a clerk over the justice who employed him has long been both great and notorious is clear from the frequent references to it in literature. Early in the seventeenth century Fletcher, in "The Elder Brother," makes Miramont say to Brissac:[175:2]-- "Thou monstrous piece of ignorance in office! Thou that hast no more knowledge than thy Clerk infuses."