THE LAW WIG.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), 22 February 1883, Page 4

THE LAW WIG.

The wig remains and maintains itself upon the "heads of bench and bar, from which no amount of legal convulsions seem able to detach it. Yet the wig cannot boast of any very great antiquity, aud is after all only a survival of a part of the general and was not confined to any particular class. Lawyers and divines were probably among the last to assume the wig ; the latter were among the last to give it up, and the lawyers now only still retain it —but it must be observed iv various stages of its development. The Judges, Queen's counsel, and some other officials still wear the long full-bottomed wig when iv full dress. The Judges on ordinary occasions wear a short wig much like what was worn by divines in the latter purfc of the last century and by all gentlemen in its middle portion. The barrister's ordinary wig exactly represents the wig as it was worn iv the last stage, just before the great French Revolution. The wig as seen, for instance, in the well-known portrait of James Boswell, might at this day be worn iv court by a barrister, and would' hardly attract notice. The only difference would be that Bos well's wig was powdered, whereas the modern legal wig is made of white horsehair. A visit to the National Portrait Gallery will show approximately the date at which the Judges began to wear wigs. One of the earliest examples seems to be that of Sir John Powell, who became a Judge in 16S0. and died in 1696, and was one of the Court before whom the seven bishops were tried in 1688. He is represented in his judicial robes and wearing along dark-brown wig : so, too, is portrayed Jeffreys, wearing a long brown wig as Recorder of London. Lord King, who was afterwards Lord Chancellor, was' Chief Justic of the Common Pleas in 1514, and in a picture dated 1720 appears in a long black wig. Lee, who was Chief Justice of the King's Bench from 1737 to 1754, figures in a long grey wig. Sir John Pratt, the father of Lord Camden, who was Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and who died 1725, has a long dark wig. It is thus seen that, on the first use of the wig by the Judges, they wore it as it was worn by persons of fashion, and as powder came in they also followed suit. The earlier Judges are all in their blackcaps, worn over the sergeant's coif, which were afterwards both indicated in the circular depression in the top of the wig, in which might be seen the edges of the white muslin coif below the diminished representative of the black patch. The legal wig has therefore only an antiquity of under 200 years, and falls short by 500 years of being entitled to claim the immemorial usage of English law, which runs from the commencement of the reign of Richard 1., whose Grand Justiciar would have looked as strange in a full-bottomed wig as a modern Judge of the Supreme Court of Judicature would look in a coat of mail. The legal profession, however, in England were allowed to adopt and wear their wigs without serious rebuke or molestation. Whereas, in France, in 1690, a book was published by Jean Baptiste Thiers, Doctor in Theology and Cure of Champroud, to condemn the scandalous and abusive irregularities of ecclesiastics, who wore prukes—a work considered of sufficient importance to be translated into Italian, and printed again at Beuevento in 1722. Notwithstanding this denunication, it does not appear that the wearing of wigs was discontinued by the clergy either in Italy or France.—The Saturday Review.