54 court of appeals of maryland

at intervals during the year. An act of 1748,
Chapter 7, relaxing a rule adopted shortly before,
gave express permission to county clerks to con-
tinue taking recent volumes of records to their
houses to work on them because going to the court
houses would be a hardship on the clerks. An-
other noteworthy fact of the final appellate juris-
diction, even after the Revolution for a consider-
able period of time, was the slow pace of cases
once they reached the docket. Clearly movement
was not regarded as an essential of litigation on
appeal. It was not uncommon, indeed, for a case
to lie becalmed on the docket for a decade; and
there are many entries of abatement by death.

Some changes occurred in the constitution of
the court during the eighteenth century, before the
Revolution, chiefly from a demand for separation
of the tribunals of the province. It has been seen
that in 1694 the lawyers expressed a conviction
that judges on the Court of Appeals and judges of
trial courts should be different persons. In 1709,
and again, in 1720, the Lower House of the As-
sembly complained that members of the Council
who sat as justices of the Provincial Court also
sat on appeals ;⁴⁶ and the consequences of this was
the establishment of a precedent that a justice who
had sat on the trial of a case in the Provincial
Court, should not sit on the same case on appeal.
After that fewer members of the Council sat in
the Provincial Court, and in 1760, when two mem-
bers happened to be justices of the Provincial
Court, the Attorney General recommended that
they should be replaced by others so that the Court

46. Mereness, 234.