on the death of Sir George Jessel, to the court of appeal. The Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875, in addition to the reorganization of the courts, had provided a body of rules to regulate practice in the separate divisions of the new High Court. After some years these rules needed revision as the result of experience, and it was also necessary to provide a comparatively inexpensive machinery enabling trustees, executors, and beneficiaries to secure necessary judicial aid without the ruinous costs of an administration suit, often enough undertaken for the sake of the costs. Fry was on the rule committee of the judges, and with respect to this particular evil he regarded his work as one of the best actions of his life. In fact ‘he invented the procedure by originating summons which effected a beneficial revolution’. Lord Cozens-Hardy [q.v.] also says that the gradual development of the new system of practice which replaced the old practice of the high court of Chancery might almost be called the invention of Fry.
From 1883 to Whitsuntide 1892 Fry sat in the Court of Appeal with, among others, Lord Esher, Lords Justices Baggallay, Cotton, Lindley, and Bowen. Lord Esher tried Fry’s patience and temper sometimes, but on the whole these two very different men got on well enough, while the relations between Fry and Lindley and Bowen were the happiest possible. Sir Alfred Hopkinson [Memoir of Sir Edward Fry, p. 81] says that Lindley, Bowen, and Fry together ‘contributed invaluable work in the development of English case law at a time when there was a special need for men who possessed such qualities as his [Fry’s] for dealing with the new conditions then arising’. The same writer says of Fry, ‘no better example of this power to master fully the most complicated facts, to state the relevant matter clearly, to draw from a long series of precedents the true principles to guide a decision and to apply them fearlessly, can be given than the judgment delivered by him and adopted as the judgment of the whole Court of Appeal in the Banstead Common case’ (Robertson v. Hartopp, 1889).
Sir Edward Fry decided to retire in 1892 on the completion of his fifteen years on the bench. Actually there was a quarter of a century of active life before him and he was at the height of his judicial powers. He was somewhat weary of the noise and turmoil of the courts and longed to live permanently in the country with more leisure for reading and travel. The Frys left London for their country home at Failand, near Clifton. There the ex-judge sat in the local court of petty sessions, and from 1899 to 1913 took the chair of quarter sessions and an aldermanship of the Somerset county council. He was eighty-six when he retired from this work. From time to time he also sat on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
Various estimates exist of the judicial capacity of Sir Edward Fry. Probably the final estimate will be that he was a great judge, though his abilities were never tested by a seat in the House of Lords. Infinitely painstaking and versatile to an unusual degree, with a very large range of knowledge, he combined a passion for seeking out first principles and for doing justice, with a fixed determination not to move out of the ambit of the case as limited by the facts before him. His strictly logical mind in these circumstances tended not only to limit the application of a judgment, but to rely on a somewhat technical view of the facts and of the law. He was working in a difficult period of transition from the old practice to the new, and his type of mind was of peculiar value in the period 1877 to 1892. In the House of Lords he might have given freer scope to his passion for first principles than was possible in the new Supreme Court. When he was free of highly technical civil procedure he was, whether in cases at quarter sessions or in his writings on legal themes, capable of the longest outlook. Probably, when, the history of English law for the period falls into perspective, it will be found that Fry did more than any other lawyer, with perhaps the exception of Lord Cairns, to secure perfect continuity in the adaptation, under purified conditions of civil procedure, of the rules of law to modern social conditions.
Fry’s later life was one of singular and beneficent activity. He took more than four years of leisure and travel, and then, when on the verge of seventy years, he plunged once more into the turmoil of work. He accepted in 1897 the offer to preside over the royal commission on the Irish Land Acts, an office which he filled with such capacity, knowledge, and tact that his services were at once widely called upon. In 1898 he acted as conciliator, under the Conciliation Act of 1896, in the colliery strike of South Wales and Monmouth, and, although the conciliation failed, his report led to the termination of the strike; the men had fall confidence in him. In 1901 he acted
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