come more unstained out of the ordeal of a searching inquiry into their characters. But there are startling exceptions. A story is told of the great warrior judge and learned author, Ranulph de Glanville. He is said to have unjustly condemned Sir Gilbert de Plumpton, in 1184, on a charge of rape, for the purpose of enabling the knight's widow, who was a wealthy heiress, to be married to a friend of his own. Sentence of death was passed and immediate execution ordered, but the Bishop of Worcester humanely in terfered, and on the case being referred to the king, Sir Gilbert's life was spared, al though he was kept in imprisonment for the rest of the reign. . There seems to be no doubt that the judges were in the habit of taking money from others beside the king. In the reign of Edward I wholesale corruption disgraced the bench. On his return from France, in 1289, he was met with heavy complaints that his judges took bribes and gave false judgments. The king immediatlely instituted inquiries, and the result was that almost all the judges were dismissed from their office, and some of them only redeemed themselves from imprisonment by the payment of con siderable fines. In the sixth year of Edward II, John de Boses, one of the judges of assize, was convicted of abstracting a king's writ and substituting a false one in its place. In 1350 William de Thorpe, the
chief justice of the king's bench, was con victed of receiving bribes to stay justice. For this he was committed prisoner to the Tower, all his property was confiscated, and he narrowly escaped hanging. When the bench was so corrupt, we can hardly suppose the bar was pure. The statute of West minster (3 Edward I) enacts that, if "ser jeant countors do any manner of deceit or collusion in the king's court, he shall be imprisoned for a year and a day, and from thenceforth shall not be heard to plead in the court for any one." What was known to the Roman law as the base offense of prcevarieatio, to which Cicero more than once alludes, existed also in England, for one of the petitions to Parliament, in the eighteenth year of Edward I, complains of a counsellor of one party having re ceived a bribe from the other, for whom he procured a verdict. The judges seem to have been employed in old times in drawing acts of Parliament, and we are not sure that much of the con fusion and many of the mistakes which occur in modern statutes might not be avoided if they performed the same function now. At all events, the bills in Parliament might use fully be submitted to them for revision be fore they are finally passed. But the judicial staff is, under present arrangements, too much overworked to admit of this. — The Law Times.
