The judges gave their services for nothing, and, for once, released from all their own trammels, set to work to do substantial justice between landlord and tenant, personalty and realty, the life interest and the remainder, covenantor and covenantee, after a fashion which excited the admiration and won the confidence of the whole City.  The ordinary suitor, still left exposed to the pitfalls of the special pleader, the risks (owing to the exclusion of evidence) of a non-suit and the costly cumbersomeness of the Court of Chancery, must often have wished that the subject-matter of his litigation had perished in the flames of the great fire.

This court sat in Clifford’s Inn, and was usually presided over by Sir Matthew Hale, whose skill both as an arithmetician and an architect completed his fitness for so responsible a position.  Within a year the work was done.

The Act for rebuilding the City is an elaborate measure of more than forty clauses, and aimed at securing “the regularity, safety, conveniency and beauty” of the new London that was to be.  The buildings were classified according to their position and character, and had to maintain a prescribed level of quality.  The materials to be employed were named.  New streets were to be of certain widths, and so on.  This is the Act that contains the first Betterment Clause:  “And forasmuch as the Houses now remaining and to be rebuilt will receive more or less advantage in the value of the rents by the liberty of air and free recourse for trade,” it was enacted that a jury might be sworn to assess upon the owners and others interested of and in the said houses, such sum or sums of money with respect of their several interests “in consideration of such improvement and melioration as in reason and good conscience they shall think fit.”

It takes nothing short of a catastrophe to suspend in England, even for a few months, those rules of evidence that often make justice impossible, and those rights of landlords which for centuries have appropriated public expenditure to private gain.[126:1]

The moneys required to pay for the land taken under the Act to widen streets and to accomplish the other authorised works were raised, as Marvell informs his constituents, by a tax of twelve pence on every chaldron of coal coming as far as Gravesend.  Few taxes have had so useful and so harmless a life.

All this time the Dutch War was going on, but the heart was out of it.  Nothing in England is so popular as war, except the peace that comes after it.  The king now wanted peace, and the merchants on ’Change had glutted their ire.  In February 1667 the king told the Houses of Parliament that all “sober” men would be glad to see peace.  Unluckily, it seems to have been assumed that we could have peace whenever we wanted it, and the fatal error was committed of at once “laying up” the first-and second-rate ships.  It thus came about that, whilst still at war, England had no fleet to