Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Hengham, Ralph de
HENGHAM or HINGHAM, RALPH de (d. 1311), judge, son of Sir Andrew de Hengham or Hingham, was born at St. Andrew's Manor, Hengham or Hingham, Norfolk, during the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Like most of the great lawyers of his time he was an ecclesiastic. On 29 Oct. 1274 he was preferred to the prebend of Moreton-cum-Whaddon in the church of Hereford; on 19 Oct. 1275 he was appointed to the chancellorship of the diocese of Exeter, which he resigned in 1279. In 1280 he received the prebendal stall of Cadington Major in the church of St. Paul's, which he held until his death. On 16 Nov. 1287 he was appointed to the archdeaconry of Worcester, but resigned the office in the following year (Le Neve, Fasti, i. 417, 512, ii. 369, iii. 74). His rise as a lawyer must have been rapid. In 1270 he was appointed justice of the king's bench, with a salary of 40l. per annum. In November 1272 he was transferred by Edward I to the common pleas. In Michaelmas term 1273, or soon afterwards, he returned to the king's bench, of which he was chief justice in November 1274, with a salary of sixty marks per annum. In the parliament of 1289–90 he was accused of false judgment and false imprisonment, convicted, dismissed from office, and sent to the Tower, but was released on payment of a fine which contemporary chroniclers represent as of the enormous amount of 8,000l. The case is mentioned as a precedent in the year-book of the second year of Richard III (Mich. f. 22), but the offence is there stated to have consisted in the falsification of a record, in order to reduce a fine imposed on a poor man from 13s. 4d. to 6s. 8d. Nothing is said of the committal to the Tower, and the amount of the fine is given as eight hundred marks. According to a tradition which first makes its appearance in Coke's ‘Institutes’ (pt. iv. 255), the fine was applied to building a tower in Palace Yard, opposite the entrance to Westminster Hall, with a clock which struck the hours so as to be heard within the hall. There appears to be no reason to doubt that a clock-tower which stood on the spot indicated, and was not pulled down until 1715, was erected towards the close of the thirteenth century. In the time of Elizabeth the tradition was so well known that Justice Southcote, in refusing to alter a record, observed that he did not mean to build a clock-tower (Stow, Survey of Westminster, ed. Strype, vi. 55; Archæologia, v. 427, xxxiii. 10). The same formula was used by Chief-justice Holt on a similar occasion. After the demolition of the tower its site was marked by a sundial, with the motto ‘Discite justitiam moniti,’ until the present century (Smith, Antiq. Westm. p. 28). Notwithstanding his disgrace, Hengham was summoned to the parliament of March 1300 among the justices and others of the council; was commissioned to perambulate the forests in the counties of Essex, Buckingham, and Oxford in the following April (Archæologia, xxxvii. 435); and on 14 Sept. 1301 was appointed chief justice of the common pleas. He was degraded, however, on the accession of Edward II, to the post of puisne judge of the same court. His last summons to parliament is dated 27 April 1309. He died on 18 May 1311, and was buried on the 27th in St. Paul's Cathedral (Chron. Edw. I and II, Rolls Ser., i. 270). His tomb was in the north aisle facing the choir, and bore the following inscription:—
Per versus patet hos Anglorum quod jacet hic flos;
Legum qui tuta dictavit vera statuta,
Ex Hengham dictus Radulphus vir benedictus.
(Dugdale, St. Paul's, ed. Ellis, pp. 33, 68). Hengham is the reputed author of a register of writs, which perhaps formed the basis of the great compilation entitled ‘Registrum Cancellariæ,’ or ‘Registrum omnium Brevium,’ first printed in 1531, and styled by Coke ‘the most ancient book of the law’ (Inst. pt. iv.); also of two manuals of practice, entitled ‘Hengham Magna’ and ‘Hengham Parva,’ written in barbarous Latin, and edited by Selden in 1616. The antiquity and repute of these treatises is established by the fact that Selden mentions an English translation of them as extant in a manuscript of the time of Edward II or Edward III (Dugdale, Chron. Ser. 56; Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliæ). Tanner (Bibl. Brit.-Hib.) mentions two other Hengham manuscripts, namely, ‘Summa Judicandi essonia,’ and ‘Cum sit necessarium,’ the first of which seems by its title to be merely a fragment of the ‘Hengham Magna.’ There are also some treatises ascribed to Hengham in the manuscript collection in the possession of Lord Tollemache, of Helmingham Hall, Suffolk (Hist. MSS. Comm. 1st Rep. App. 61).
[Campbell's Lives of the Chief Justices; Foss's Lives of the Judges; Annales Monastici, iii. 357, iv. 321, Langtoft, ii. 187, Oxenedes Chron. p. 275, Chron. de Melsa, ii. 251 (all Rolls Ser.); MS. Cotton, Claudius E. viii. f. 260; French Chron. of London (Camd. Soc.), p. 96; Excerpta e Rot. Fin. ii. 504; Dugdale's Orig. pp. 44; Chron. Ser. pp. 22–6, 34; Rot. Parl. i. 48, 52; Parl. Writs, i. 83, ii. div. ii. pt. ii. 3, div. iii. 995; Mod. Rep. vi. 130; Blomefield's Norfolk, ii. 443; Brayley and Britton's Hist. of Palace and Houses of Parliament at Westminster.]