JUDICIAL CORRUPTION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND .sx I .sx Great Britain's ambassador to Constantinople from 1746 to 1762 believed that the " chief evil in Turkey " was the " iniquitous administration of their laws , which are an impending sword in the hand of corruption , ever ready to cut away their lives and properties " .sx " They tell " , wrote Sir James Porter , " of some rare examples in Turkey , of uncorrupt judges ; I have heard of one , but none have come to my certain " .sx .sx These were hardly original observations .sx Some 150 years earlier , the traveller Fynes Morison had noted that the Turkish law courts were " so corrupted with bribery , as the best cause is in danger to be lost , if money be wanting , and where that is , an ill cause may pass and the worst be " .sx .sx But for Porter and his contemporaries judicial probity was also a significant hallmark of civic enlightenment .sx In the East , according to the jurist Sir William Blackstone , litigants customarily presented judges with gifts :sx " This is calculated for the genius of despotic countries , where the true principles of government are never understood , and it is imagined that there is no obligation from the superior to the " .sx In England , however , such conduct was proscribed as bribery , " which is when a judge , or other person concerned in the administration of justice , takes any undue reward to influence his behaviour in his " .sx While severely punished among 'inferior officers' :sx in judges , especially the superior ones , it hath been always looked upon as so heinous an offence , that the Chief Justice Thorpe was hanged for it , in the reign of Edward III .sx .. And some notable examples have been made in parliament , of persons in the highest stations , and otherwise very eminent and able , but contaminated with this sordid vice .sx .sx Blackstone's implication is clear :sx unlike the benighted Turk , eighteenth-century Englishmen were blessed with a judiciary of the utmost moral integrity .sx This sentiment was widely shared .sx " Our judges " , wrote the Rev. Martin Madan , " are not only respectable with regard to their office .sx .. but are so incorrupt as magistrates , that they are , what Caesar said his wife ought to be - Not only chaste - but unsuspected " .sx Such claims may be regarded as part of a legitimizing rhetoric common to both Court and Country in Hanoverian England .sx But was the potent image of the stern-faced yet incorruptible judge ( for George Orwell " one of the symbolic figures of England " ) successfully diffused and accepted through that society ?sx The ideology of the rule of law , which historians have credited with both maintaining social stability and facilitating economic growth during the century after 1688 , certainly required that all legal proceedings take place before a " bench that was both learned and honest " .sx Yet eighteenth-century England is also often portrayed as a society shot through with corruption and venality .sx How then did the judges avoid suspicions which must surely have undercut their participation in the great symbolic drama enacted on the assize circuits and at Westminster Hall ?sx This question becomes more pressing when we reflect upon the dubious public image of the later Stuart judiciary :sx The ambidextrous judges , bribed , rebrib'd .sx And lesser gifts to greater still subscribed .sx .sx Such unflattering portrayals continued well beyond the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution ; in 1692 we read of :sx Votes of scarlet judges bought and sold , .sx If purchased by the mighty power of gold .sx .sx All the evils of the legal system , wrote Richard Collins in 1698 , occur " principally through the remissness , or rather , gross corruption of the judges " .sx If such assertions were current at the end of the seventeenth century , how long afterwards did they persist ?sx And whatever the image , what were the realities of judicial behaviour in early modern England ?sx Needless to say , any attempt to reconstruct the facts of corruption - crudely , who took what from whom and to what effect - encounters formidable difficulties of fact and interpretation .sx Given the nature of the subject , hard evidence is inevitably scanty and its evaluation problematic .sx Besides the need to distinguish past from present ethical standards , it is not always obvious what the relevant norms were , and are .sx Evidential and methodological problems notwithstanding , perceptions of , and reactions to , allegedly corrupt judicial behaviour can hardly be understood without reference to judicial practice , and vice versa .sx So this article considers not only the reputation , but also the actions of English judges , from the later Middle Ages to the mid-eighteenth century .sx It focuses primarily on the improper acceptance of gifts and other inducements ( 'undue rewards' ) offered by and on behalf of litigants to judges sitting in the superior courts of Westminster Hall ( as distinct from civil lawyers presiding in ecclesiastical and other jurisdictions , or J.P.s and lesser magistrates) .sx Of course 'bribery' and 'corruption' were elastic terms .sx Their use could and did extend to the illicit sale of legal office ( because buyers might be tempted to recoup the purchase price in bribes ) and the subordination of the strict dictates of justice to the interests of the government of the day , or those of a dominant e lite - indeed virtually any distortion of the public good for private ends .sx How and why the sphere of what was held to be judicial impropriety widened , as expectations of judicial conduct became more stringent , is a major theme of the following pages .sx They proceed in broadly chronological fashion :sx after outlining what was formally required of medieval judges , and how far those requirements affected their behaviour , I shall examine the nature and causes of the rising concern about judicial corruption apparent from the later sixteenth century , the significance of mid-seventeenth-century reforms , and the extent to which the eighteenth - century judiciary succeeded in establishing an image of impartial incorruptibility .sx II The spectre of judicial corruption haunted the West from classical times onwards .sx Its immediate occasions , which Cicero specified as gratia ( favour ) , potentia ( power , coercion ) and pecunia ( cash , bribes ) , appear to have changed little over the centuries .sx Following the short-lived Provisions of Oxford ( 1258 ) , which sought to ensure that the chief justiciar " take nothing unless it be presents of bread and wine , and such things , to wit food and drink , as have been used to be brought to the tables of great " , the first legislative expression of these anxieties in an English common-law context was the oath admimstered from 1344 onwards to newly appointed justices of the courts of King's Bench , Exchequer and Common Pleas .sx By the statutes 18 Edw .sx III c. 4 and 20 Edw .sx III c. 1 , all judges swore to " do equal law and execution of right to all .sx .. rich or " , and not " take fee nor robe of any man .sx .. and .sx .. no gift or reward by themselves , nor by other .sx .. of any man that hath to do before them by any way , except meat and drink , and that of small " .sx Embodying principles found in Roman law , although specifically intended to hinder nobles from retaining royal justices as clients or followers , this oath did not prevent judges receiving gifts of any kind , even from parties to suits before them .sx Pace Blackstone , foodstuffs and wine seem to have been routinely offered by litigants , and accepted by judges , throughout the Middle Ages and well into the early modern period .sx According to Sir John Fortescue , chief justice of King's Bench from 1442 to 1461 , in his celebrated eulogy of the laws of England , the oath was rigorously observed .sx After describing the ceremonial creation of a judge , Fortescue stated that " it hath never been known that any of them hath been corrupt with gifts or bribes " ( aliquem donis aut muneribus fuisse corruptum ) .sx This forthright assertion of perennial judicial probity is not , apparently , a denial that judges took presents , but rather that they allowed themselves to be influenced by such gifts .sx It is therefore not necessarily inconsistent with the recent discovery , in the accounts of an inveterate knightly litigant , of a substantial disbursement on a robe of cloth of gold and crimson velvet , intended for Sir John Fortescue C.J.K.B. Such a present was plainly prohibited by both the letter and spirit of the judges' oath .sx Yet even despite such seemingly damning testimony , successful attempts to pervert the course of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century justice may well have been far from common .sx Legal historians , perhaps not surprisingly , seem uncomfortable with any harsher verdict .sx Half a century ago , Sir William Holdsworth emphasized that the many accusations of judicial partiality made in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were usually incapable of proof , since " trustworthy evidence is scanty " , although he conceded that Fortescue's claims on behalf of his judicial colleagues past and present were " no doubt unduly optimistic " .sx More recently John Baker has asked whether , when early Tudor judges declared the law , they were indeed " wholly independent and uncorrupt ?sx " .sx On the whole , he concludes , they were .sx The crown and the rich did not always prevail , as they would have done if political pressure and bribery had dominated the workings of the courts ; nor is there any " plain example of undue influence upon the judiciary affecting a decision in a private matter " , and further " no serious allegations of corruption were made by contemporaries " .sx Although these pleas in mitigation may seem slightly strained , the legal historians are right to caution us against granting automatic credence to generalized accusations and complaints , often made by demonstrably ill-informed or self-interested witnesses .sx Nor is their reluctance to indict past generations of judges except on the basis of evidence not merely that bribes were offered , but that they were accepted and resulted in a plain miscarriage of justice , necessarily misplaced .sx If for no better reason than fear of the consequences , both in this life and the next , medieval judges cannot usually have behaved in ways which directly contravened the letter of their oath ; there is no evidence that Fortescue actually accepted the costly robe intended for him .sx Yet that oath did not altogether debar gifts from potential or former litigants .sx Nor did it specify precisely the quantity or quality of food and drink which judges might legitimately accept from parties to suits in process before them .sx As Baker himself points out , a whole barrel of sturgeon was thought an appropriate present for the chief justice of Common Pleas in 1534 , while the fact that Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More and Chief Justice Sir John Fitzjames were both reputed to have refused all gifts from litigants suggests " that such scruples were unusually fine " .sx The crucial question is whether the presents routinely taken by their less scrupulous colleagues constituted the kind of 'undue rewards' which were liable to pervert the course of justice .sx It is impossible to believe that they never did , especially in the light of the markedly more pessimistic assessments of late medieval judicial probity presented by historians primarily concerned with the use which the landed classes made of the law , rather than the law's internal workings .sx In addition to legal records , such historians employ a broad range of evidence , including family papers and literary sources , and have no disciplinary predilection for defending the reputation of the courts or judiciary .sx At the same time , their distinctly harsher verdicts are not wholly irreconcilable with the more defensive judgements of Baker and Holdsworth , who do not deny the existence of judicial corruption in late medieval England , but seek rather to discount its influence on the everyday workings of the courts .sx If both sides to a dispute customarily gave gifts and mobilized whatever influence they might command with judges , jury and court officials , such practices may often have had little net impact on the eventual legal outcome , although whether this consideration placated the losing party is another matter .sx Differences in cultural norms must also be taken into account .sx In the Middle Ages gift-giving routinely accompanied many social transactions , while abstract concepts of justice and injustice arguably " coexisted with the different expectations of the participants themselves about how disputes ought to turn out , expectations that often had more to do with local , private patterns of power than with our crude conceptions of right and " .sx Yet having allowed the medieval judiciary every benefit of the evidential and relativistic doubt , what are we to make of the profusion of comment disparaging corrupt and venal judges from contemporary moralists , poets and preachers ?sx