Perhaps the most astonishing chapter in the history of our law courts is that dealing with the official staff. Medieval law had a poorly developed notion of contract and a highly developed law of property. Offices, such as clerkships in the courts, came to be regarded as property; the official had a freehold for life in the office, just as he might have such a freehold in land. As the work of the courts increased the staff was not increased accordingly, for that would have interfered with property: the process was for the office holder to continue to receive the fees, but for him to employ men to do the work. In the early nineteenth century the chief clerk of the King's Bench received on an average £6,280 a year, and paid his deputy £200 a year. The patronage to these highly paid or sinecure offices was partly in the government and partly in the judges: ‘The fact that many highly placed people both in the fashionable and the judicial world had an interest in these offices, made the system extraordinarily difficult to eliminate.’

Royal Commissions investigated, and a series of statutes ending with the Courts of Justice Salaries and Funds Act 1869 converted court officials into salaried officials with pension rights assimilated to the civil service.