after revolution to 1805 91

alogy to the Governor and Council sitting as a
court, and appeals to it still had somewhat the
same position as appeals to the House of Lords.
The Lord Chief Justice of England was then a
judge of the King's Bench, and that was a court
of trial jurisdiction, subject to appeals to the
House of Lords.

But, however important the General Court may
have been, and however strong the local attach-
ment for it, a single court of law was appropriate
only to a more compact population such as Mary-
land had had nearer to the time of its settlement,
and as the population grew and spread, restriction
to the one Provincial and General Court inevit-
ably became burdensome to litigants, jurors and
witnesses. Its abolition with the growth of the
population was destined from the beginning; the
same process, indeed, which in the thirteenth cen-
tury caused the establishment of the nisi prius or
circuit system in England, to relieve of the burden
of attendance at Westminster Hall, must inevit-
ably have brought about the abolition of the Gen-
eral Court in Maryland sooner or later; and so it
did. Before the end of the seventeenth century a
proposal was made in the General Assembly that
itinerant justices of the Provincial Court be ap-
pointed on each side of the bay, to ride circuits,
with their clerks, as the judges in England did, and
that a Provincial Office be established on each side
of the bay, with process to be issued by the clerks
there, and records to be kept on each shore.⁴⁹ And
throughout the remainder of the provincial pe-
riod, successive legislative enactments transferred

49. Archives, Proc. Assembly, 1693 to 1697, 42 and 175.