Behalve de geestelijkheid zelf viel een deel van het huwelijksrecht en van het erfrecht onder de
jurisdictie van deze rechtbanken, waarvan een aantal verbonden was met het door Dickens
herhaaldelijk beschreven of vermelde Doctors'. Het droeg aanzienlijk bij tot de chaotische
toestanden, die Dickens vooral t.a.v. erfrecht aantrof. Werd in het Court of Chancery langdurig
gestreden over een erfenis, de geldigheid van een testament of legaat moest eerst in een kerkelijke
rechtbank worden vastgesteld. In The Pickwick Papers (ch.10) vlucht mr Jingle dan ook met zijn
bruid naar Doctor Commons'.
Now Doctors' Commons being familiar by name to everybody, as the place where they grant
marriage-licenses to lovesick couples, and divorces to unfaithful ones; register the wills of people
who have any property to leave, and punish hasty gentlemen who call ladies by unpleasant
names, we no sooner discovered that we were really within its precincts, than we felt a laudable
desire to become better acquainted therewith; and as the first object of our curiosity was the
Court, whose decrees can even unloose the bonds of matrimony, we procured a direction to it;
and bent our steps thither without delay. Crossing a quiet and shady court-yard, paved with
stone, and frowned upon by old red brick houses, on the doors of which were painted the names
of sundry learned civilians, we paused before a small, green-baized, brass headed-nailed door,
which yielding to our gentle push, at once admitted us into an old quaint-looking apartment, with
sunken windows, and black carved wainscoting, at the upper end of which, seated on a raised
platform, of semicircular shape, were about a dozen solemn-looking gentlemen, on crimson
gowns and wigs. (Doctors' CommonsSketches by Bo%).
Doctors' Commons was een samenraapsel van verschillende rechtbanken, waarvan de leden
hetzelfde gebouw gebruikten en die bestonden uit dezelfde individuen. Het bevatte de Admiral
ty Court; de Prerogative Office, waar testamenten werden geregistreerd en bewaard; de
Prerogative Court, dat testamentaire zaken behandelde; de Court of the Arches, het provincia
le hof van de Aarsbisschop van Canterbury; en het Consistory Court, het diocesane hof van de
Bisschop van Londen.
It's a little out-of-the-way place, where they administer what is called ecclesiastical law, and
play all kind of tricks with obsolete old monsters of acts of Parliament, which three-fourths of
the world know nothing about, and the other fourth supposes to have been dug up, in a fossil
state, in the days of the Edwards. It's a place that has an ancient monopoly in suits about people's
wills and people's marriages, and disputes among ships and boatsthey are managed and
decided by the same set of people, down in the same Doctors' Commons. You shall go there one
day, and find them blundering through half the nautical terms in Young's Dictionary, apropos of
the 'Nancy' having run down the 'Sarah Jane,' of Mr. Peggotty and the Yarmouth boatmen having
put off in a gale of wind with an anchor and cable to the 'Nelson' Indiaman in distress; and you
shall go there another day, and find them deep in the evidence, pro and con., respecting a
clergyman who has misbehaved himself; and you shall find the judge in the nautical case the
advocate in the clergyman's case, or contrawise. They are like actors: now a man's a judge, and
now he is not a judge;.... (David Coppe-rfield ch.xxiii)
Even later in hetzelfde hoofdstuk laat Mr.Spenlow David Doctors' Commons zien:
Mr.Spenlow conducted me through a paved court yard formed of grave brick houses, which I
inferred, from the Doctors' names upon the doors, to be the official abiding places of the learned
advocates of whom Steerforth had told me; and into a large dull room, not unlike a chapel to my
thinking, on the left hand. The upper part of this room was fenced off from the rest; and there,
on the two sides of a raised platform of the horse-shoe form, sitting on easy old-fashioned chairs,
were sundry gentlemen in red gowns and grey wigs, whom I found to be the Doctors aforesaid.
Blinking over a little desk like a pulpit-desk, in the curve of the horse-shoe, was an old gentleman,
