Going to
law in this case meant usually, first, a certain amount of
preliminary litigation before the Archbishop of Canterbury; but
sooner or later it was sure to end in an appeal to the Pope's court,
or, as the phrase was, an appeal to Rome.
Without wishing for a moment to defend or excuse a state of things
which was always vexatious, and at last became intolerable, it is
impossible to deny that a great deal of nonsense has been talked and
written about these appeals. Almost exactly the same state of things
exists in the present day both in civil and ecclesiastical matters.
Parsee merchants fall to loggerheads in Bombay or Calcutta, and bring
their disputes before the courts in India; one side feels aggrieved
by the sentence, and straightway he removes the case to a court of
appeal in London. Or some heretical person in Asia or Africa or
somewhere else gets into hot water with an orthodox society for the
promotion of religious persecution, and sooner or later the
archbishop is appealed to, and the ecclesiastical lawyers have a most
delightful time of it. It all costs a great deal of money nowadays,
and leading advocates on this side or that are actually so
extortionate and exorbitant that they will not do anything for
nothing, and insist on receiving the most exorbitant fees. So it was
in the old days.
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