seldom wise to take to the High Court a claim which could be decided in the county, unless one is prepared to show that difficult matter of law, or some other good cause makes the choice reasonable.

It is worth noticing as a sign of the times that under quite recent statutes there are a few actions and other proceedings which can be begun only in a County Court. This is the case with actions brought by workmen against their masters under the Employers' Liability Act, 1880. So, when a still later Act1 gave to farmers a new right to compensation for improvements, it gave an appeal to the county court judge from the arbitrators who decide in the first instance, and this no matter how large the sum in dispute. Many proposals have been made for enlarging, and even for removing altogether, the money barriers which now confine these courts. Such proposals cannot here be discussed, but it will have been observed that during the last fifty years the judicial organisation of England has undergone a great change. It would be a mistake to think that £50 is a small sum. Of course, there is no absolute standard for the importance of a sum of money; £5 is as important to one man as £500 to another; but there is a sense in which £50 can truly be said to be a large sum: most of the contentious litigation in England is about smaller sums than this. When it is added that every year more than a million actions are begun in the County Courts, and more than a million and a half of money is obtained under their judgments, it will be seen that they are already doing work on a large scale.

The procedure in them is fairly simple, and it is believed that an intelligent suitor has seldom much diffi1 Agricultural Holdings Act, 1883.

culty in conducting his case without professional help. And such he is not likely to have if his claim be quite small. Both solicitors and barristers practise in these courts, but the litigants very often appear in person. The normal trial in a County Court is trial before a judge who decides both fact and law without a jury. In any case with leave of the judge, and if the claim exceed £5 then without such leave, either party can insist on a trial by jury. There will be but five jurors; they must be unanimous in their verdict. As a matter of fact, however, juries are very seldom employed.1 From the judge's determination on any point of law, but not from his decision on matters of fact, there is an appeal to the High Court if the sum which can be recovered in the action exceeds £20, or if the judge gives leave. With the leave of the High Court, but not without, there is a further appeal to the Court of Appeal, and so to the House of Lords.

Outside this general system stand a few other local courts which differ widely in history, in competence, in usefulness. The county of Lancaster preserves the palatine privilege of having its own Chancery, a court which is valued by the thickly-peopled shire. The court of the Vice-Warden of the Stannaries is chiefly concerned with the mining companies of Cornwall and Devon. The City of London has a Lord Mayor's Court, Manchester a Court for the hundred of Salford, Liverpool its Court of Passage, Bristol its Tolzey Court. These, and two or three others, do some

1 In 1883, the actions determined with a jury were 949, with. out 610,009.

considerable business. It is reckoned that there are some twenty-eight of these anomalous local courts, but many have done nothing for some years past; they have been worsted in a struggle for existence with the new County Courts.

CHAPTER IV.

LAW AND EQUITY.

The

NEW as are the county courts, the central courts of which we are now to speak are in some sort newer yet, for they came into being only in 1875. change that was then accomplished was great, and perhaps will seem greater as time goes on. But it was a very technical change, and those quite unacquainted with its nature may be inclined to think it nominal. Before, it may be said, there were Courts of Chancery, Queen's Bench, Common Pleas, Exchequer, Probate, Divorce, Admiralty, and also appeal courts or courts of error, the Court of Appeal in Chancery, the Exchequer Chamber; afterwards there was a High Court of Justice and a Court of Appeal, but the former had its Chancery, its Queen's Bench, its Common Pleas, its Exchequer, its Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Divisions, and though two of these five divisions, the Common Pleas and Exchequer, have since been abolished, the other three remain. Before, there was common law and there was equity; it is said that the two are "fused" and administered concurrently; but it is familiar to all that lawyers are still talking of law and equity, of legal rights and equitable rights, and so forth. Is not then

the alteration but verbal, or at most a matter of minute detail? It may be possible in this chapter to say something which shall help towards an understanding of the change.

That concentration of civil justice to which we have already referred did England one good service. It secured a common law; law, that is, common to the whole land. This seems the original meaning of the phrase common law; it is law for England, not for this county, or that borough, though afterwards new contrasts give it a narrower meaning, and it is opposed both to statute law and to equity, law administered only by that new court, the Chancery How much law there really was common to the whole land during the first hundred years or so after the Conquest, is a question which will never be answered very fully; but of this we may be sure, that even if there were not already full grown many local peculiarities which the King's Court ignored and therefore extirpated, still nothing but a strong central control would have prevented their growth in rank abundance. Instead of the myriad local customs of France and Germany, we at a very early time came by a common law. And this was not brought about by the importation from abroad of ready-made law. It is true that in the thirteenth century the King's Court already had professional judges, ecclesiastics for the most part, and the best learning of the time, no matter its origin, did not remain a thing for doctors and scholars. But it was worked into a web of genuinely English law. The administration of that law was not left to a few judges; the good and lawful men of the shire had an active share in the work. Trial by a sworn inquest of neighbours, the mode of trial which came to