It was the ambition of the kings who rose on the fall of the Roman empire, even of those who reigned in Saxon England, to gather round them as many as they could obtain of the attributes of the emperor or basileus, and hence each generally had his cancellarius. In Central Europe the office would naturally descend from the imperial court of Charlemagne; and in France the chancellor became the head of the law and the minister of justice. The office was abolished at the first Revolution. At the Restoration the ministry of justice was made a separate office, and the chief function of the chancellor was to preside in the House of Peers.

It is perhaps in England that we have the most remarkable illustration of the struggle between the influence of the imperia] usages and the constitutional spirit of the Northern nations. The existence of common law courts enforcing in its strictness what was deemed the old law of the land, and the chancery with its regal equity interfering to give redress, presents to us the English people with their common lawyers standing up for their rights and privileges, and the monarch, with his clerical advisers, endeavouring to acquire the imperial prerogatives. The chancellor was generally a churchman, who took his ideas of law from the canonists and the civilians, whose principles were intensely disliked by the common lawyers. Hence the two systems called law and equity grew up in antagonism, neither throughout a long contest being able to conquer the other; and hence it is that England has been burdened with the inconvenience of having two systems of jurisprudence, the one called common law, the other equity. The spirit of the former, indeed, may be said to have been so far triumphant in compelling equity to depart from her digressional vagueness, and become a fixed system as securely bound to statute and precedent as the common law itself. But even in Selden’s day we find the laxity of the chancellor’s equity so much suspected, that he says in his Table Talk, — “Equity is a roguish thing. For law we have a measure—know what to trust to: equity is according to the conscience of him that is chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is equity. It is all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a foot a chancellor’s foot. What an uncertain measure would this be! One chancellor has a long foot, another a short foot, another an indifferent foot; it is the same thing in the chancellor’s conscience.” How little, indeed, the chancery practice had been at that time moulded into a strict system, we may infer from the seals being held by a churchman, the celebrated Archbishop Williams, and this at the time when the common law had accumulated that amazing mass of intricate precedents which it tasked all the diligence and genius of Coke to reduce into order. Clarendon, when he became chancellor, had been twenty years out of practice, and his successor Shaftesbury had no pretensions to be acquainted with law. Lord Nottingham appears to have been the first who wished to apply strict rules in the court of chancery, but it does not seem to have been in a fit condition for their application. Roger North says, “He was a formalist; and took pleasure in hearing and deciding, and gave way to all kinds of motions the counsel would offer; supposing that if he split the hair, and with his gold scales determined reasonably on one side of the motion, justice was nicely done—not imagining what torment the people endured who were drawn from the law, and there tost in a blanket.” (Life of Lord Keeper Guildford, 423). Guildford himself, who, in the words of Lord Campbell, “had as much law as he could contain,” made light of the mere judicial business of his office, which ere then, however, had begun to show its characteristic defects, for, according to his biographer, “the greatest pain he endured ensued from a sense he had of the torments the suitors underwent by the excessive charges and delays of the court.”

The Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain is a great state officer, with varied and disconnected functions. He is in official rank the highest civil subject in the land out of the royal family, and when raised to the peerage, as he invariably is, he takes precedence immediately after the archbishop of Canterbury. His functions have sometimes been exercised by a “lord keeper of the great seal but there appears to be no essential difference between the two offices, save that the keeper is appointed by mere delivery of the seal, which is of itself sufficient to confer all the powers appertaining to the office, while a chancellor receives letters patent along with it. As a great officer of state, the chancellor acts for both England and Scotland, and in some respects for the United Kingdom, including Ireland. As an administrative officer, as a judge, and as head of the law, he acts merely for England. In the first class of functions he acts as prolocutor, speaker, or chairman of the House of Lords, and in this capacity it sometimes falls to him to adjudicate in Scottish law, since he often leads the judgment of the house on appeals. (See Appeal.) By the Treaty of Union, one great seal was appointed to be kept for all public acts. Hence, in this department, the chancellor’s authority extends to the whole of Britain, and thus the commissions of the peace for Scotland as well as England issue from him. His English ministerial functions are thus briefly described by Blackstone :—“He became 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 the value of twenty marks per annum in the king’s books. He is the general guardian of all infants, idiots, and lunatics, and has the general superintendence of all charitable uses in the kingdom.” There is much convenience in the repetition of such vague definitions, from the difficulty of more specifically defining the chancellor’s functions in these matters. His indistinct and unsatisfactory authority as to charitable foundations has been virtually superseded by the Charity Commissioners’ Act of 1853 (17 Vict. cap. 137). The Lord Chancellor is by office a privy-councillor, and it has long been the practice to make him a cabinet minister. Hence he belongs to a political party, and is affected by its fluctuations. This has often been denounced as destructive of the independence and calm deliberativeness essential to the purity and efficiency of the bench. In defence, however, of the ministerial connection of the chancellor, it has been said that, while the other judges should be permanent, the head of the law should stand or fall with the ministry, as the best means of securing his effective responsibility to parliament for the proper use of his extensive powers. The addition of permanent judges to the Chancery Court has removed many of the objections to the fluctuating character of the office.

Under the Judicature Act, 1873, the Lord Chancellor is president of the Court of Appeal, and, although the Act is singularly indefinite on the subject, of the High Court of Justice also. He is named as president of the Chancery Division of the latter court. By the Amendment Act of 1875, he is not tobe deemed a “permanent member of the High Court of Justice” within the meaning of the section of the original Act, limiting the number of permanent judges to twenty-one. His judicial patronage is very extensive, and Lord Campbell says that he is by usage the adviser of the Crown in the appointment of judges in the superior courts. His proper title is “Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain and Ireland.” His salary is £10,000 per annum, and he is entitled to a pension of £5000 per annum.

In Ireland there is a lord chancellor at the head of the equity system, which arose in minute imitation of the English.

In Scotland a chancellor appears at a pretty early period in history, as the person who, being the adviser and conscience-keeper of the king, issued his writs or letters for the remedy of injustice done by judges or other persons in power. A comparison between the English and the Scottish chancellors of the 13 th century would probably show them to have then been much alike. Subsequently, however, the civil law predominating in Scotland, the chancellor was its chief administrator, instead of leading on a system antagonistic to the common law. Hence he became the leading judge of the Court of Session on its establishment in 1533. While Episcopacy predominated he was generally an ecclesiastic, never a working lawyer; and after the Revolution he became an officer of state, who was not expected to be a working lawyer. Hence, when by the Treaty of Union the great seal for public transactions was appointed to be kept in England, the Lord Chancellor of Scotland dropped out of existence. A keeper of the great seal continued to be appointed for sealing writs as to private matters, and the office of director of chancery remained for the transaction of routine business connected with the department. When the method of certifying hereditary successions was simplified and placed on a uniform system in 1848, it was put under the direction of an officer called the Sheriff of Chancery.

The Chancellor of a Diocese is an officer who holds the courts of the bishop, and acts as his assessor or adviser in matters of ecclesiastical law. A bishop may be compelled to appoint a chancellor; and there is no appeal from the chancellor to the bishop.

The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is an officer appointed of old chiefly to determine controversies between the king and his tenants of the duchy land, and otherwise to direct all the king’s affairs belonging to that court. By late practice, the office, nominally one of high dignity, but demanding little exertion, has been given to statesmen who have grown old in other and more laborious offices, but whose services are still desired in the ministry.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer is an officer who, according to the old definitions of his functions, presides in the Exchequer Court, and takes care of the interest of the Crown. He is always in commission with the lord treasurer for the letting of Crown lands, <fcc., and has power, with others, to compound for forfeitures of lands upon penal statutes. While the treasury is understood to have the custody and distribution of the collected revenue, it is the function of the exchequer to realize it. Hence the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as the head of that department which proposes to parliament the plans for the annual revenue, and sees to its realization, is always an important member of the cabinet. Sometimes he is prime minister. His annual statement of the method by which he proposes to meet the exigencies of the exchequer is called “The Budget.” The salary attached to the office is £5000 a year.

The equitable jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery was founded on the supposed superiority of conscience and equity over the strict law. The appearance of equity in England is in harmony with the general course of legal history in progressive societies. What is remarkable is that, instead of being incorporated with or superseding the common law, it gave rise to a wholly independent set of tribunals. The English dislike of the civil law, and the tendency to follow precedent which has never ceased to characterize English lawyers, account for this unfortunate separation. The claims of equity in its earlier stages are well expressed in the little treatise called Doctor and Student, published in the reign of Henry VIIL :—“Conscience never resisteth the law nor addeth to it, but only when the law is directly in itself against the law of God, or law of reason? So also King James, speaking in the Star Chamber, says, “Where the rigour of the law in many cases will undo a subject, then the chancery tempers the law with equity, and so mixes mercy with justice, as it preserves a man from destruction.” This theory of the essential opposition between law and equity, and of the natural superiority of the latter, remained long after equity had ceased to found itself on natural justice, and had become as fixed and rigid as the common law itself. The jealousy of the common lawyers came to a head in the time of Lord Ellesmere, when Coke disputed the right of the Chancery to give relief against a judgment of the Court of Queen’s Bench obtained by gross fraud and imposition. J ames I., after consultation, decided in favour of the Court of Equity. The substitution of lay for clerical chancellors is regarded by Mr Spence (Equitable Jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery) as having at first been unfortunate, inasmuch as the laymen were ignorant of the principles on which their predeeessors had acted. Lord Nottingham is usually credited with the first attempt to reduce the decisions of the court to order, and his work was continued by Lord Hardwicke. By the time of Lord Eldon, equity had become fixed, and the judges, like their brethren in the common law courts, strictly followed the precedents. Henceforward chancery and common law courts have exhibited the anomaly of two co-ordinate sets of tribunals, empowered to deal with the same matters, and compelled to proceed in many eases on wholly different principles. The Court of Chancery could in most cases prevent a person from taking advantage of a common law right, not approved of by its own system. But if a suitor chose to go to a court of common law, he might claim such unjust rights, and it required the special intervention of the Court of Equity to prevent his enforcing them. In many cases also a special application had to be made to chancery for facilities which were absolutely necessary to the successful conduct of a case at common law. Another source of difficulty and annoyance was the uncertainty in many cases whether the chancery or common law courts were the proper tribunal, so that a suitor often found at the close of an expensive and protracted suit that he had mistaken his court and must go elsewhere for relief. Attempts more or less successful were made to lessen those evils by giving the powers to both sets of courts; but down to the consolidation effected by the Judicature Act, our judicial system justified the sarcasm of Lord Westbury, that we set up one tribunal to do injustice and another to stop it. In one of the last cases, the custody of an infant, which had been granted by the Queen’s Bench to one claimant, was transferred by the Court of Chancery to another. The payment of a sum of money into court for the benefit of the child made her a ward of court, and enabled the judge in chancery to apply the principles of equity to the case.

The equitable jurisdiction of chancery was commonly divided into exclusive, concurrent, and auxiliary. Chancery had exclusive jurisdiction when there were no forms of action by which relief could be obtained at law, in respect of rights, which ought to be enforced. Trusts are the most conspicuous example of this class, and are, in fact, the main staple of the business of the court. It also includes the rights of married women, infants, and lunatics. Chancery had concurrent jurisdiction when the common law did not give adequate relief, eg., in cases of fraud, accident, mistake, specific performance of contracts, <fcc. It had auxiliary jurisdiction when the administrative machinery of the law courts was unable to procure the necessary evidence.

The Judicature Act, 1873, enacts (§24) that in every civil cause or matter commenced in the High Court of Justice, law and equity shall be administered by the High Court of Justice and the Court of Appeal respectively, according to the rules therein contained, which provide for giving effect in all cases to “equitable rights and other matters of equity.” The 25th section declares the law hereafter to be administered in England on certain points, and ordains that “generally in all matters not hereinbefore particularly mentioned in which there is any conflict or variance between the rules of equity and the rules of the common law with reference to the same matter, the rules of equity shall prevail.”

. Previous to being merged in the New Supreme Court of Judicature, the Court of Chancery consisted of the Lord Chancellor, the Master of the Rolls, two Lords Justices of Appeal, and three Vice-Chancellors. The Vice-Chancellors and Lords Justices of Appeal are comparatively recent creations.

Notwithstanding the fusion of the courts the great division between common law courts and chancery is not obliterated. The chancery judges form a division by themselves, to which all the pending business of the old court has been transferred, and to which all causes and matters which, but for the Act, would have been within the exclusive jurisdiction of that court are assigned. The Chancery Division still is, and probably will for a long time be, distinguished from the others by the peculiar nature of its business, by the peculiar nature of its administrative arrangements, and by having a separate bar. Another distinction is making itself apparent, and will assume great importance if finally established. The Chancery Division seems to be unwilling to try cases by jury; and in a recent case there has been a direct collision of opinion on this subject between the Chancery and the Common Law Judges.