The origins of the Office of Master of the Rolls are to be sought in the history of the development of the Chancery. The Chancery was at first a branch of the royal household closely connected with the king's chapel. The Chancellor was simply the king's chaplain who in the intervals of his proper duties acted as the king's secretary. As such he became the custodian of the king's seal,—later to be called the great seal to distinguish it from other and smaller seals,—and at length his secretarial duties increased so far that he became the head of a great administrative department.

Coke and Bacon, the two greatest lawyers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, were members of Trinity College. Bacon was the greatest jurist of his day. Coke was the greatest of our common lawyers. I account it a great honour that Trinity College should in 1926, the tercentenary of Bacon's death, have asked me to say something of Bacon as a lawyer, and that in this year, 1934, the tercentenary of Coke's death, it has asked me to give this lecture.

If a German professor announces his intention of speaking on the inner relationship between English and Roman law, he must first state why he intends to do so. When I reviewed Roman law, and later on English law, from the German point of view, it struck me again and again that the two systems touch each other at many points. It is obvious that this relationship must be clearer to a person acquainted with German law (and therefore speaking as an outsider) than it is to an English student who understands his law by working within the system and appreciates it accordingly. This, then, is one justification. Since I have not been brought up in English law, I shall always remain a layman, despite all my efforts to penetrate its nature.

The recent discussion of precedents in English law is of great interest to Continental lawyers, because Continental law also has some slight experience of the doctrine of binding force of judicial decisions.

[William Joseph Whittaker, after graduating as ‘Senior’ in the Law Tripos and Chancellor's Medallist, in 1888, and winning a Whewell Scholarship in 1890, was a very successful teacher in the Cambridge Law School till 1900, when he went into practice. In 1901 he was appointed Professor of English Law at University College, London, and, in 1905, to a post on the staff of the Council of Legal Education. In that year he married Hildegarde, daughter of Walter Wren, who survives him. He died in 1931.