Sometimes consulting counsel will condescend to come into court to argue some disgustingly technical point about ’contingent remainders’ or ’conveyancing.’ On such occasions they evince unbounded contempt for the court, whose ignorance necessitates their presence. They will consume a whole day in dull and dry arguments, and send some judges to sleep, and those who remain awake after counsel’s speech know less of the matter than they knew before; their brains are muddled with the legal rigmarole they have been listening to. The ecclesiastical counsel, who flourished in the days before the Probate and Divorce Courts were established, and from ’doctors’ became ’counsel,’ when called out into the general practice of the new system, were like so many owls suddenly brought into daylight, Sir Cresswell Cresswell so bedevilled them, and yet did it so politely that they could not complain.
Barristers had a good time of it in those old days of the Ecclesiastical Courts; the system of appeal was splendidly organized—the pettiest case could gradually be raised into one of great importance. There were courts throughout the country—royal, archiepiscopal, episcopal, decanal, sub-decanal, prebendal, rectorial, vicarial, and manorial. A case arises in any one of these courts, and the verdict being unsatisfactory to one of the parties, he appeals to the courts of the archdeacons and others, where the case is again heard, decided, and again appealed against. Poor men, who cannot go on for ever, must stop; but the party who can afford it goes to the Consistorial Court, where the whole process of hearing, deciding, and appealing is repeated. The third step is the Chancellor’s Court; the fourth the Court of Arches. If the appellant still has some money left, he may go to the Privy Council—formerly to the Court of Delegates at Doctors’ Commons, now abolished. This is no mere imaginary case. ’There was a case,’ says Dr. Nicholls, ’in which the cause had originally commenced in the Archdeacon’s Court at Totnes, and thence there had been an appeal to the Court at Exeter, thence to the Arches, and thence to the Delegates; and the whole question at issue was simply the question which of two persons had the right of hanging his hat on a particular peg. Fancy, what an army of barristers must have grown fat on this oyster!’