That position, he had by this time discovered, was no bed of roses. His knowledge of the principles of the art of navigation was no doubt a qualification, and no mean one, for the office; but it does not appear that, amongst his numerous studies, he had ever directed any special attention to that of the law. For the ordinary practitioners of the Common Law he had indeed an unconcealed aversion, having had only too much to do with them; nor does it appear that he had ever given any special attention to the Civil Law. The general rules also by which Courts of Admiralty were to be guided, being in the seventeenth century but ill-ascertained, and an appeal being held to lie from the Court of Admiralty in Ireland to the English Admiralty Court, his situation as judge was precarious.
In England itself the jurisdiction was in dispute, for 'in the reign of James 1st the Lord High Admiral of the day had protested against the encroachments of the Courts of Common Law, and claimed among other things for His own Judges a Jurisdiction at least concurrent with that of the Judges of the Land in suits arising out of foreign contracts and contracts executed in England, but wholly or in part to be performed on the High Seas, and in suits instituted for the recovery of Mariners wages. This claim Westminster Hall, which up to the time of Lord Mansfield never failed to evince great jealousy towards the Civil Law and its professors, was not prepared to concede.'[1]
At first there was little or nothing to do. 'The famine in
- ↑ Those who are interested in the merits of this question will find the arguments on either side in 4th Coke's Inst, 37 et seq., and in a short treatise written expressly in answer to Coke, by Dr. Zouch, an eminent civilian, Judge of the Court of Admiralty in 1641, and again in 1660. The controversy revived with the office of Lord High Admiral, in the reign of Charles II. On one occasion, Dr. Leoline Jenkins argued at the bar of the House of Lords in support of a Bill introduced for the purpose of defining the jurisdiction of the Court of Admiralty, in opposition to Chief Justice Vaughan. On another occasion he is related to have encountered in the same cause, but before the King in Council, a still more formidable antagonist, viz. Lord C.J. Hale, who, says Molloy, in his preface to the treatise De Jure Maritimo et Navali, 'by his law, position, as other his great reasons, soon put a period to that question, which during his days slept, and it may modestly be presumed will hardly (if ever) be awaked.' Life of Sir Leoline Jenkins, I. lxxvi.
