A History of English Law. By W. S. Holdsworth. Vol.
L (Methuen. 25s. net.)—Professor Holdsworth has rewritten his well known and valuable history of English law to 1485, in three volumes, and is continuing the work to 1700 in four more volumes. The first volume, a history of the judicial system to the reforms of 1874, has just appeared. It is admirably planned and contains a mass. of important and curious detail regarding the courts both great and small. We may draw attention to the account of the legal offices which Bentham and other pertinacious economists denounced as useless after Waterloo. A jungle of vested interests had grown up under cover of the mediaeval theory that a man's office was his freehold, which Magna Charts guaranteed to him. Thus it came about that the Lord Chancellor, the Chief Justices and other high functionaries had offices to give or sell. There was a delightful official of the King's Bench, the " Filazer, Exigenter, and Clerk of the Outlawries," whose average income was £5,104 16s. 9d., and who had the work, whatever it was, done by deputies who received £567 5s. The Chief Clerk did even better, taking £6,280 18s. 6d. and paying his deputy only £200. These and other handsome sinecures were abolished by an Act of 1837. Professor Holdsworth has much to say of the costliness of proceedings in the old courts. In the seventeenth century, for example, the son of a Chief Justice spent £200 in recover- ing a debt of £4. But, after all the reforms, litigation is not yet cheap.
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