as regards Magister Ricardus, he simply speaks of his having preceded Pillius in composing an Ordo Judiciarius, of which he had failed to see a copy. Yet almost every Civilian, who has treated of the Literature of the Civil and the Canon Law during the last three centuries, has enumerated Magister Ricardus Anglicus amongst the Readers in Law at Oxford. On the other hand, we have more certain evidence of William of Drogheda having taught at Oxford. There is a house still known in Oxford as Drogheda Hall, and it is said that University College has some deeds relating to it.

There was indeed a period during the Interdict, when the services of Magister Ricardus, as a teacher of Law in Oxford, would have been welcome. King John, in the year 1209, made a warlike expedition into Scotland, being enraged against William, King of Scots, for having allowed many of the English clergy to take refuge in Scotland, and the King on his return halted at Woodstock to receive the homage of the Welsh Nobles, whom he had summoned to attend him there. The King afterwards proceeded to his castle at Oxford, and whilst he was there resident, the prefect of the city of Oxford reported to him that an Oxford student had killed a woman, and had escaped from the police. The King thereupon gave orders that three fellow-students who lived in the same lodgings with the culprit, but knew nothing respecting the culprit's place of refuge, nor had any complicity with him in his crime, should be seized and conducted outside the limits of the City, and thereupon all three of them should be hanged in the presence of the students.* The indignation produced by this glaring act of cruelty and injustice was so great that the entire body of Masters and Students (tam magistri quam discipuli), three thousand in number, abandoned the Schools of

* Matthew Paris, Historia Anglorum, Rolls Ed., Vol. II., p. 120. The author of the Flores Historiarum disposes of this event in three lines.

Oxford and sought refuge at Cambridge, or at Reading, or at Maidstone. Matthew Paris is our authority for this great secession of the Oxford scholars. He had his details. from Roger of Wendover, the contemporary Historiographer of the Abbey of St. Alban's, and he says that the King did this iniquitous act to make manifest his wrath against the Clergy.

So far, at least, we have a record of the Secular Clergy, not the Monks, acting as the champions of justice and secular learning at Oxford in the first quarter of the Thirteenth Century, and if higher preferment had not awaited Magister Ricardus in other fields of usefulness both to the Church and to the State, which have been mentioned in the previous Article, his name should find a place in the Walhalla of the Isis, if the busts of the most famous Professors of the University of Oxford should ever be collected in such a sanctuary. As it is, we find him summoned soon after his appointment as Bishop of Chichester to take part with the Bishops assembled at the first Council of King Henry III. in 1215, in reviewing and re-issuing the Great Charter, which King John had trampled under foot, and his name stands fifth in the list of Bishops, at the head of which is Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, who had crossed his path at Rome in 1204. Magister Ricardus seems to have had a marvellous power of conciliating all persons with whom he was brought into contact, and his Ordo Judiciarius supplies evidence of the pains which he had taken in his early youth in studying the approaches to the human heart, and the variations of the human character. He held the See of Chichester for three years only, when he was called away to replace an elder brother, Bishop Herbert Poore, in the Church of Sarum, in which he had spent many anxious years as Dean. He has left behind him at Chichester little to remind the present generation of his short tenancy of a Church at that time.

almost derelict, but of which a later Bishop Richard became a still more distinguished Pastor, namely, Richard de la Wich, who had also filled a Chair of Law at Bologna, and in whose honour, as the last English Prelate canonised in the Middle Ages, the old chapel of Lincoln's Inn was dedicated.

Ricardus Anglicus, on the other hand, has no tomb in any of the Cathedral churches which he more or less restored, but his admirers may point to the noble Cathedral at Sarum for which he gave the site and of which he completed nearly the entire structure, and in answer to an enquiry, where is the monument of this great Bishop, may well apply to him the classic saying :-" Monumentum si quæris, circumspice." TRAVERS Twiss.

II. THE HIGH COURTS AND THE COLLECTORMAGISTRATES IN INDIA.

TWO

TWO decisions of the High Court of Bengal have just brought to light fresh instances exposing the demoralisation that has been produced in India by the practice of vesting Revenue collectors with Judicial authority

-an authority which enables them to evade punishment when they are guilty of illegal and criminal actions. The following appear, from the proceedings in Court, to have been the facts in the cases to which we refer.

Two inhabitants of Eastern Bengal, Chandr Kishore Munshi and Dinendr Nath Sanyal, had altercations regarding their respective shares in the rents of certain lands in the Serajganj subdivision of the district of Pubna. Dinendr claimed a portion of the rents which the tenants were paying to Chandr, and appears to have induced Mr. Beatson Bell, the Collector-Magistrate of the subdivision, to

extort from Chandr an agreement conceding his claim. Accordingly Mr. Bell summoned Chandr to his private residence on Sunday morning, 7th June, 1891, and told him that he should not be allowed to depart until he had come to terms with Dinendr (who was present on the occasion) and had signed an agreement to that effect; adding that, in case of refusal, Chandr should at once be arrested on a charge of hiring lathiwals (club-men). Chandr was then detained without food, and seeing no means of escape from the persecution with which he was threatened, he intimated in the afternoon his readiness to obey the Collector's order. Mr. Bell then wrote out the desired agreement, which both parties signed in the presence of two police officers who were called to witness the execution of the deed.

Some days later, Chandr, on being requested to appear before the Registrar of Deeds and acknowledge his signature to the agreement, refused to do so on the ground that the signature had been obtained by unfair means. Dinendr then appealed to various local authorities for an order to enforce Chandr's compliance, and eventually obtained a decision in his favour from the Subordinate Judge of the district. From that decision Chandr appealed to the High Court at Calcutta, whose Judgment, delivered on the 17th August last, contains the following important passages:

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"There cannot, we think, be a shade of doubt that the "defendant's signature to the agreement was obtained by "duress and intimidation. Mr. Bell's evidence is con"clusive on the point.

We are of opinion that the "defendant's signing of the agreement under the "circumstances was not an execution thereof within the "meaning of the Act; indeed it was no execution at all. "Execution must mean voluntary execution, that is the "signing of the document of the executant's free will. It "could not possibly be contended that, if Mr. Bell had

"forced a pen into the defendant's hand, held it there, and "by force guided the hand to write the signature, such a signing was an execution in law; and there is no difference "between the two cases. We think therefore that the appeal must be allowed with costs. We cannot con"clude this Judgment without expressing an unqualified. disapproval of the conduct of Mr. Bell in this matter." This case fully exposes the debased condition into which the administration of Justice has been brought by our vaunted paternal Government of India. The liberty and property of unimpeachable subjects may, it appears, at any time be attacked with impunity; and, as in a Turkish Pashalic, a man may rob his neighbour, provided he secures the Pasha's co-operation. In the present instance, the victim, after two years of harassing anxiety, was eventually rescued by the intervention of the High Court; but the bulk of the people have not the means of appealing to that independent tribunal, and the Government are meanwhile persistently labouring to curtail its jurisdiction and destroy its independence. The latter object has already so far been accomplished, that a Government servant now sits on the bench of the High Court in the N.W. Provinces, although his appointment by the Indian Executive has been pronounced, by the Chief Justice and the duly qualified Judges of that Crown Court, to be ultra vires, and therefore illegal. In the course of the Judgment to this effect, which was delivered in January last, the Chief Justice said: "The object and intention of the Imperial Parliament could not "have been to place in the hands of the Governor-General "in Council a power which would enable the Executive in "India to constitute a High Court of one Barrister Judge "acting as Chief Justice, and of Acting Judges who could, "at the will of the Executive, be removed from their "appointments in the High Court, and could, in the case "of Civilian Judges, be gazetted out of the Court to

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