Back Matter

Note on David Copperfield

"Doctors' Commons."

Dickens's description of Doctors' Commons, in Sketches by Boz,  shows that his attention was early attracted to this odd ecclesiastical anomaly. The following accounts of "The Commons," their rise, progress, and fall, are extracted from Lord Bowen, in Mr. Ward's Reign of Queen Victoria,  and from Sir Walter Phillimore's Ecclesiastical Law. 

"The spiritual or ecclesiastical courts of the country from an early period had exercised authority in matters of testacy and intestacy as regarded personal estate, had issued probates of the wills of those who died possessed of personalty, and letters of administration of those who died without a will. The bulk of the testamentary business of the ecclesiastical courts was chiefly non-contentious—formal representative proceedings where no dispute arose. If the validity of a will or the title to administer was challenged, a suit became necessary, and to this all parties interested were cited. A number of spiritual courts or chambers scattered through England took cognisance of this testamentary procedure—the courts of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the diocesan courts of the bishops, the archdeacons' courts, and other tribunals of still more limited jurisdiction. The Court of Arches, which belonged to the Archbishop of Canterbury, served as the appellate centre for the province of Canterbury, and from it a further appeal lay to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a body that had recently been substituted for the Court of Delegates of Henry VII. Doctors' Commons was the place where the principal ecclesiastical proceedings were held, and a body of advocates and proctors enjoyed in it a monopoly by which the general profession was excluded from audience and practice. All judges and officers of the spiritual courts were appointed by the prelates, and the other functionaries over whose tribunals they presided. They were sometimes lawyers of position, sometimes lawyers of no position at all, sometimes clergymen, and were usually paid by fees. Many offices were granted in succession and reversion, deputies discharging the duties, of which the emoluments were considerable. The inefficiency of the judges, the variations of practice and procedure, the expense, the delay, the frequently inconsistent and mistaken views of law and of fact adopted by the different authorities, the anachronism of a system which permitted civil rights to he decided by judges not appointed by, nor responsible to, the Crown, and, finally, a general sense that these tribunals were a soil in which abuses grew and flourished, rendered their fall inevitable. The flavour, the air, the humorous absurdity of many abuses in many branches of the law have been preserved to us by the pen of Charles Dickens. Writers of sentimental fiction not unfrequently exercise their powers of sarcasm on the subject of the enormities of law by inventing for the law courts an imaginary procedure which never yet was seen, and then denouncing its iniquities. But the caricatures of English law, at the beginning of the reign, which Dickens has made immortal, are full of the insight of a great artist—have come to us direct from the brain of one who has sat in court and watched—represent real scenes and incidents as they might well appear to the uninitiated in the 'gallery.'

"His pictures of the chancery suit of 'Jarndyce and Jarndyce,' of the common jury trial of Bardell v. Pickwick,' contain genuine history. In David Copperfield  be has sketched with his usual felicity the fraternity of Doctors' Commons and the ecclesiastical officials who thronged its purlieus. Like so many other of the antiquated subjects of his satire, Doctors' Commons was soon destined to decay. A royal Court of Probate was established in its place at Westminster Hall, with district registries throughout the kingdom; and the various ecclesiastical jurisdictions which the new court superseded ceased to exist thenceforward, so far as testamentary causes were concerned."

"In the Report of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commissioners of 1832 it was stated as follows:—

" 'The ecclesiastical laws, as now existing, have been for upwards of three centuries administered, in the principal courts, by a body of men associated, as a distinct profession, for the practice of the civil and canon laws.

" 'Some of the members of this body, in the year 1567, purchased the site upon which Doctors' Commons now stands, on which, at their own expense, they erected houses for the residence of the judges and advocates, and proper buildings for holding the ecclesiastical and admiralty courts, where they have ever since continued to be held. In the year 1768 a royal charter was obtained, by virtue of which the then members of the society, and their successors, were incorporated, under the name and title of "The College of Doctors of Law exercent in the Ecclesiastical and Admiralty Courts."

" 'This college consisted of a president (the Dean of the Arches for the time being) and of those doctors of law who, having regularly taken that degree in either of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and having been admitted advocates in pursuance of the rescript of the Archbishop of Canterbury, shall have been elected fellows of the college in the manner prescribed by the charter. According to the present rules of these courts, a candidate for admission, as an advocate, is required to deliver, into the office of the vicar-general of the province of Canterbury, a certificate of his having taken the degree of Doctor of Laws, signed by the registrar of the university to which he belongs.

" 'A petition, praying that in consideration of such qualification the candidate may be admitted an advocate, is then presented to the Archbishop, who issues his fiat for the admission of the applicant, directed to his vicar-general, who causes a rescript or commission to be prepared, addressed to the Dean of the Arches, empowering and requiring him to admit the candidate as an advocate of that court. To this a proviso is added, "that the person to be admitted shall not practise for one whole year from the date of his admission," in order that, by attending during the interval, he may acquire a competent knowledge of the forms of proceedings in those courts.

" 'On the day appointed for the admission, which is always one of the four regular sessions in each term of the Arches Court, the candidate is presented by the two senior advocates to the Dean, who directed the Archbishop's rescript to be read, and the oaths to be administered.

" 'From the college of advocates the Archbishop has always selected the judges of the archiepiscopal courts.'

"The college was abolished in pursuance of 20 & 21 Vict. c. 77, when the Probate and Divorce Courts were established.

"The ecclesiastical courts have latterly, ex necessitate rei,  admitted barristers to practise in them; but the Archbishop's power to admit advocates remains. The Church Discipline Act, 3 & 4 Vict. c. 86, s. 7, enacted that where a clerk is to be proceeded against before the bishop, articles shall be drawn up against him, to be signed by an advocate practising in Doctors' Commons.' But after the dissolution of the College of Advocates the Court held that a barrister could sign instead of an advocate."