Volume 1

Microcosm of London / [Anon].

Date:
[1808-1811]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Microcosm of London / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    custody, whereby he becomes, without writ or patent, an officer of the greatest weight and power of any now subsisting in the kingdom, and superior in point of precedency to every temporal lord. He is a privy counsellor by his office, and, according to the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, prolocutor of the House of Lords by prescription. To him belongs the appointment of all justices of the peace throughout the kingdom. He is keeper of the king’s conscience, visitor in right of the king of all hospitals and colleges of the king’s foundation, and patron of all the king’s livings under 20/. per annum in the king’s books. He is the guardian of all infants, idiots, and lunatics, and has the general superintendence of all charitable uses in the kingdom: and all this over and above the vast and extensive jurisdiction which he exercises in his judicial capacity in the Court of Chancerj, wherein, as in the Exchequer, there are two distinct tri- bunals; the one being a court of common law, the other a court of equity. But if any cause comes to issue in this court, that is, if any fact be disputed between the parties, the chancellor cannot try it, having no power to summon a jury, but must deliver the record propria maim into the King’s Bench. In this legal court is likewise kept the Officina Justitia, out of which do issue all original writs that pass the great seal, and all commissions of charitable uses, sewers, bankruptcy, idiotcy, lunacy, and the like. In fact, the lord chancellor of England is, in many respects, what the praetor was at Rome; but he can neither touch acts ef Parliament nor the established practice of other courts, much less reverse the judgments already passed in these latter, as the Roman praetors sometimes used to do in regard to their predecessors in office, and sometimes also in regard to their own. Vol. I. D d
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