CHAPTER LXVIII.

CIRCUITEERS.

THE sociability of circuit-life in the days when roads were bad, when counties were sparsely populated, and when highwaymen infested the lines of communication between all important places, was favourable to the disposition of barristers who were quick at seizing and clever at illustrating the humorous side of ordinary events. Exposed to some of the discomforts, if not all the dangers,* of travel; required to ride over black and cheerless tracts of moor and heath; now belated in marshy districts, and now exchanging shots with gentlemen of the road; sleeping, as luck favoured them, in way-side taverns, country mansions, or the superior hotels of provincial towns, the circuiteers of olden time found their advantage in cultivating social hilarity and establishing an etiquette that encouraged good-fellowship in their itinerant societies. At an early date they are found varying the monotony of crosscountry rides with racing matches and drinking bouts, cockfights and fox-hunting; and enlivening assize towns and country houses with balls and plays, frolic and song. A prodigious amount of feasting was perpetrated on an ordinary circuit-round of the seventeenth century; and at circuit-messes, judges' dinners, and sheriffs' banquets, saucy juniors were allowed a licence of speech to staid leaders and grave dignitaries that was altogether exceptional to the prevailing tone of

manners.

* Lord Eldon, when he was handsome Jack Scott of the Northern Circuit, was about to make a short cut over the sands from Ulverstone to Lancaster at the flow of the tide, when he was restrained from acting on his rash resolve by the representations of an hotel-keeper. "Danger, danger," asked Scott, impatiently,—“have you ever lost anybody there?" Mine host answered slowly, "Nae, sir, naebody has been lost on the sands,—the puir bodies have a' been found at low water."

Of circuit life-on the Northern, Norfolk, and Western Circuits in the days of Charles II. the reader may find some amusing illustrations in the writings of Whitelock, North, Hyde, and inferior annalists of the same date. In a section of this work that refers to lawyers on horseback, the judges and gentlemen of the long robe are seen on the Northern Circuit, riding in armed array, and ready to answer attacks from moss-troopers. Even to the close of the last century, to make the entire round of the Northern Circuit was an undertaking of many discomforts and some hazard. Circuit life in Wales, and the counties bordering on the principality, was often rough and perilous, but in the provinces nearer London the gaiety of circuiteers was less frequently disturbed by apprehensions for their personal safety.

In the days when Chief Justice Hyde, Clarendon's cousin, used to ride the Norfolk Circuit, old Serjeant Earl was the leader, or, to use the slang of the period, "cock of the round." A keen, close-fisted, tough practitioner, this serjeant used to ride from town to town, chuckling over the knowledge that he was earning more and spending less than any other member of the circuit. One biscuit was all the refreshment which he permitted himself on the road from Cambridge to Norwich; although he consented to dismount at the end of every ten miles to stretch his limbs. Sidling up to Serjeant Earl, as there was no greater man for him to toady, Francis North offered himself as the old man's travelling-companion from the university to the manufacturing town; and when Earl with a grim smile accepted the courteous suggestion, the young man congratulated himself. On the following morning, however, he had reason to question his good fortune when the serjeant's clerk brought him a cake, and remarked, significantly, "Put it in your pocket, sir; you'll want it; for my master wont draw bit till he comes to Norwich." It was a hard day's work; but young Frank North was rewarded for his civility to the serjeant, who condescended to instruct his apt pupil in the tricks and chicaneries of their profession. "Sir," inquired North at the close of the excursion, emboldened by the rich man's affability, "by what system do you keep your accounts, which must be very complex, as you have lands, securities, and great

comings-in of all kinds?" "Accounts! boy," answered the grey-headed curmudgeon; "I get as much as I can, and I spend as little as I can; that's how I keep my accounts."

When North had raised himself to the Chiefship of the Common Pleas he chose the Western Circuit, "not for the common cause, it being a long circuit, and beneficial for the officers and servants, but because he knew the gentlemen to be loyal and conformable, and that he should have fair quarter amongst them;" and so much favour did he win amongst the loyal and conformable gentry that old Bishop Mew-the prelate of Winchester, popularly known as Bishop Patch, because he always wore a patch of black court-plaster over the scar of a wound which he received on one of his cheeks, whilst fighting as a trooper for Charles I.-used to term him the "Deliciæ occidentis, or Darling of the West." On one occasion this Darling of the West was placed in a ludicrous position by the alacrity with which he accepted an invitation from " a busy fanatic," a Devonshire gentleman, of good family and estate, named Duke. This "busy fanatic" invited the judges on circuit and their officers to dine and sleep at his mansion on their way to Exeter, and subsequently scandalized his guests-all of them of course zealous defenders of the Established Church-by reading family-prayers before supper. "The gentleman," says the historian, "had not the manners to engage the parish minister to come and officiate with any part of the evening service before supper; but he himself got behind the table in his hall, and read a chapter, and then a long-winded prayer, after the Presbyterian way." Very displeased were the Chief Justice and the other Judge of Assize, who, notwithstanding their disapproval, did not care to openly affront their host in his own house; and their dissatisfaction was not diminished on the following day when on entering Exeter they learnt that a full account of Mr. Duke's sanctimonious conduct had preceded them. It was rumoured in the High Street of the old borough that "the judges had been at a conventicle, and the grand jury intended to present them and all their retinue for it."

Not many years elapsed before this Darling of the West was replaced by another Chief Justice who asserted the power of constituted authorities with an energy that roused more fear

than gratitude in the breasts of local magistrates. That grim, ghastly, hideous progress which Jeffreys made in the plenitude of civil and military power through the Western Counties, was not without its comic interludes; and of its less repulsive scenes none was more laughable than that which occurred in Bristol Court-house when the terrible Chief Justice upbraided the Bristol magistrates for taking part in a slave-trade of the most odious sort. The mode in which the authorities of the western port carried on their iniquitous traffic deserves commemoration, for no student can understand the history of any period until he has acquainted himself with its prevailing morality. At a time when by the wealth of her merchants and the political influence of her inhabitants Bristol was the second city of England, her mayor and aldermen used daily to sit in judgment on young men and growing boys, who were brought before them and charged with trivial offences. Some of the prisoners had actually broken the law; but in a large proportion of the cases the accusations were totally fictitious-the arrests having been made in accordance with the directions of the magistrates, on charges which the magistrates themselves knew to be utterly without foundation. Every morning the Bristol tolsey or court-house saw a crowd of those wretched captives—clerks out of employment, unruly apprentices, street boys without parents, and occasionally children of honest birth, ay, of patrician lineage, whose prompt removal from their native land was desired by brutal fathers or vindictive guardians; and every morning a mockery of judicial investigation was perpetrated in the name of justice. Standing in a crowd the prisoners were informed of the offences charged against them; huddled together in the dock, like cattle in a pen, they caught stray sentences from the lips of the perjured rascals who had seized them in the public ways; and whilst they thus in a frenzy of surprise and fear listened to the statements of counsel for the prosecution, and to the fabrications of lying witnesses, agents of the court whispered to them that if they wished to save their lives they must instantly confess their guilt, and implore the justices to transport them to the plantations. Ignorant, alarmed, and powerless, the miserable victims invariably acted on this perfidious counsel; and forthwith the magistrates

ordered their shipment to the West Indies, where they were sold as slaves-the money paid for them by West Indian planters in due course finding its way into the pockets of the Bristol justices. It is asserted that the wealthier aldermen, through caution, or those few grains of conscience which are often found in the breasts of consummate rogues, forbore to share in the gains of this abominable traffic; but it cannot be gainsaid that the least guilty magistrates winked at the atrocious conduct of their brother-justices.

Vowing vengeance on the Bristol kidnappers Jeffreys entered their court-house, and opened proceedings by crying aloud that "he had brought a broom to sweep them with." The Mayor of Bristol was in those days no common mayor; in Assize Commissions his name was placed before the names of Judges of Assize; and even beyond the limits of his jurisdiction he was a man of mark and influence. Great therefore was this dignitary's astonishment when Jeffreys ordered him-clothed as he was in official scarlet and furs-to stand in the dock. For a few seconds the local potentate demurred; but when the Chief Justice poured upon him a cataract of blasphemy, and vowed to hang him instantly over the entrance to the tolsey unless he complied immediately, the humiliated chief magistrate of the ancient borough took his place at the felon's bar, and received such a rating as no thief, murderer, or rebel had ever heard from George Jeffreys' abusive mouth. Unfortunately the affair ended with the storm. Until the arrival of William of Orange the guilty magistrates were kept in fear of criminal prosecution; but the matter was hushed up and covered with amnesty by the new government, so that "the fright only, which was no small one, was all the punishment which these judicial kidnappers underwent; and the gains," says Roger North, "acquired by so wicked a trade, rested peacefully in their pockets." It should be remembered that the kidnapping justices whom the odious Jeffreys so indignantly denounced were tolerated and courted by their respectable and prosperous neighbours; and some of the worst charges, by which the judge's fame has been rendered odious to posterity, depend upon the evidence of men who, if they were not kidnappers themselves, saw nothing peculiarly atrocious in the conduct of