In Our Mutual Friend (Boek I, ch.3) zegt Mortimer: "I have been, Eugene, upon the
honourable roll of solicitors of the High Court of Chancery, and attornies at Common Law, five
years..."
Dodson and Fogg, The Pickwick Papers, hadden dus geen band met the Court of Exchequer.
Zij konden niet pleiten in King's Bench of Common Pleas, maar wel in Chancery. Zowel zij
als mr.Perker moesten voor de actie in Common Pleas een sergeant-at-law erbij betrekken. En de
cliënten hadden uiteraard beiden te betalen. Waren er meerdere partijen in een geding, b.v.
meerdere erfgenamen of schuldeisers, dan konden er voor ieder een attorney en een barrister
bijkomen.
4. Procedures en kosten.
Met het voorgaande begint de aanval van Dickens in Bleak House (ch.8) op de rechtspraak
duidelijk te worden:
Equity sends questions to Law, Law sends questions back to Equity; Law finds it can't do this.
Equity finds it can't do that; neither can do so much as say it can't do anything, without this
sollicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for A and that solicitor instructing and that
counsel appearing for B; and so on through the whole alphabet, like the history of the Apple Pie.
Het 'falen' van Equity hing met de veelheid van taken van de Lord Chancellor samen. Zonder
daarop critiek te geven, gaf Blackstone dat eigenlijk al aan. (3) De Lord Chancellor had van
oudsher:
the supervision of all charters, letters, and such other public instruments of the crown, as were
authenticated in the most solemn manner: and therefore when seals came in use, he had always
the custody of the king's great seal. So that the office of chancellor, or lord keeper,is with us
at this day created by the mere delivery of the king's great seal into his custody: whereby he
becomes, without writ or patent, an officer of the greatest weight and power of any now
subsisting in the kingdom; and superior in point of precedency to every temporal lordTo him
belongs the appointment of all justices of the peace throughout the kingdom. Being formerly
usually an ecclesiasticand presiding over the royal chapel, he became keeper of the king's
conscience; visitor, in right of the king, of all hospitals and colleges of the king's foundation
He is the general guardian of all infants, idiots, and lunatics; and has the general superintendance
of all charitable uses in the kingdom. And all this, over and above the vast and extensive
jurisdiction which he exercises in his judicial capacity in the court of chancery;
Hierbij kwam, dat de Lord Chancellor lid van de regering was. Luisteren wij naar
Mr.M.A.Raylor in het House of Commonsin 1821:
He [the Lord Chancellor] was, in fact, one of the chief ministers of the Crown, liable to all the
interruptions and anxieties inseparable from such a situation. His time was not at his own
command, he was summoned at a moment's notice, from the bench to the cabinet, or called to
assist at a council in the immediate presence of his sovereign. His note-book was closed on a
sudden, and the discussion of a claim, on the issue of which thousands might depend, was hastely
interrupted and reserved for another sitting. He [Mr.Taylor] defied even the discriminating
faculties of Lord Eldon [the Lord Chancellor] to follow arguments of the advocate as he ought to
do, under such circumstances as these, and great as were the powers of his mind, they must, in
some degree, yield to the disadvantages he had to contend with. It was to the union of these two
characters, which ought ever to be kept separate and distinct, that the evil of protracted suits
