Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T04:23:32.466Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Office of Attorney-General*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Get access

Extract

One of my famous predecessors, Francis Bacon, once said that the office of Attorney-General was “the painfullest task in the realm.” It fell to another Attorney-General a few centuries later, Sir Patrick Hastings, to say that to be a law officer was to be in hell. I am happy to say that it is only occasionally that I feel like that about it.

Although it became a great office of state, its early history is wrapped in obscurity. The basis of the office appears to have been that as the sovereign could not appear in person in his own courts to plead in any case in which he had an interest, an attorney appeared on his behalf. As early as 1243 one Lawrence Del Brok, a professional attorney, was prosecuting pleas of particular concern to the sovereign. In the year 1247 he was paid a regular fee of £20 a year for “suing the King's affairs of his pleas before him.” As the functions of sovereignty became more complex and more extensive, and acquired a more public character, so the role and duties of the Attorney-General became wider. Already by the end of the thirteenth century the duties attaching to the King's Attorney's office had become burden-some. When Richard de Brettiville performed the duties, a medieval clerk added the postscript at the foot of a list of cases in which the King's Attorney was engaged, “Oh Lord, have pity upon Brettiville.”

In medieval times the political duties which now fall upon the Attorney-General werecompletely absent.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge Law Journal and Contributors 1969

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

The Law Officers of the Crown, by Professor John Edwards, published by Sweet & Maxwell, to which I am greatly indebted, is an authoritative study of this subject.