Court of Exchequer (Ireland)

The first Chief Baron was Walter de Islip, an English-born judge and statesman who also served as Lord Treasurer of Ireland.

Although they ranked as High Court judges, they were not required to be qualified barristers, and from 1400 on numerous complaints were made about their lack of legal expertise.

An act of the Irish Parliament in 1421 was aimed at those Barons who were described ominously as "illiterate men performing office in the Exchequer through deputy" and accused them of extortion.

[4] As late as the 1480s Thomas Archbold (alias Galmole), one of the Barons, was a goldsmith by trade, and Master of the Irish Royal Mint, although he may also have qualified as a lawyer.

The Court of Exchequer was originally located in a building called Collett's Inn, which is thought to have been situated roughly on present-day South Great George's Street in Dublin city centre.

[8] After the Restoration of Charles II it is clear that the Crown regarded the Exchequer as the most important of the Irish courts of common law.

To resolve the matter the British Government passed the Declaratory Act 1719, removing the power of the Irish House of Lords to hear appeals.

This Act became notorious in Ireland as the Sixth of George I, and quite unfairly the judges of the Court of Exchequer bore the brunt of the blame for it: as one of the Barons, John Pocklington, remarked: "a flame burst forth, and the country's last resentment was visited upon us".

[1] By the mid-nineteenth century, the Exchequer had overtaken the Court of King's Bench as the busiest of the courts of common law , and the death of Chief Baron Woulfe, in 1840, like that of his predecessor Thomas Dalton in the previous century, was widely blamed on his crushing workload (indeed Woulfe, who suffered from chronic ill health, had been warned that the job would kill him, and had accepted it with considerable reluctance).

The last Chief Baron, Christopher Palles, retained his rank until he retired in 1916, by which time his reputation for judicial eminence was so high that, despite his advanced age (he was eighty-four) and increasing physical frailty, the Government only accepted his resignation with great reluctance.