nnual sum of L40 payable during his life. John de Mowbray,
William de Wychingham, and William de Fyncheden, the other judges of the
Common Pleas, received 40 marks each as official salary, and L20 per
annum for their services at assizes. Mowbray's stipend was subsequently
increased by 40 marks, whilst Wychingham and Fyncheden received an
additional L40 par annum. To the Chief Baron and the other two Barons of
the Exchequer annual fees of 40 marks each were paid, the Chief Baron
receiving L20 per annum as Justice of Assize, and one of the puisne
Barons, Almaric de Shirland, getting an additional 40 marks for certain
special services. The 'Issue Roll of 44 Edward III., 1370,' also shows
that certain sergeants-at-law acted as Justices of Assize, receiving for
their service L20 per annum.

Throughout his reign Edward III. strenuously exerted himself to purge
his law courts of abuses, and to secure his subjects from evils wrought
by judicial dishonesty; and though there is reason to think that he
prosecuted his reforms, and punished offending judges with more
impulsiveness than consistency--with petulance rather than
firmness[14]--his action must have produced many beneficial results. But
it does not seem to have occurred to him that the system adopted by his
predecessors, and encouraged by the usages of his own time, was the
real source of the mischief, and that so long as judges received the
greater part of their remuneration from suitors, fees and the donations
of the public, enactments and proclamations would be comparatively
powerless to preserve the streams of justice from pollution. The
fee-system poisoned the morality of the law-courts. From the highest
judge to the lowest usher, every person connected with a court of
justice was educated to receive small sums of money for trifling
services, to be always looking out for paltry dues or gratuities, to
multiply occasions for demanding, and reasons for pocketing petty coins,
to invent devices for legitimate peculation. In time the system produced
such complications of custom, right, privilege, claim, that no one could
say definitely how much a suitor was actually bound to pay at each stage
of a suit. The fees had an equally bad influence on the public. Trained
to approach the king's judges with costly presents, to receive them on
their visits with lavish hospitality, to send them offerings at the
opening of each year, the rich and the poor learnt to look on judicial
deci