8/13/2019 Squabbling Solons and Sages Gave Penn the Jitters
1/1
Squabbling Solons and Sagesave Penn the Jitters
Olden Time Philadelphia Village of orelandNamed for
Temperamental hief Justice
a Map68
BY HARRISON W. FRYp HE clerk to the Chief Justiceof Pennsylvania
when summoned before the General As-sembly for questioning in 1685
be-came obstreperous and unmanage-able and threw himself on the
floor.But then Chief Justice NicholasMore himself was a bit
temperamen-tal. Able and upright, he was dicta-torial, arbitrary
and quarrelsome.
So it was in keeping with the spir-it of his chief that the
clerk, PatrickRobinson, refused to give the courtrecords to the
Assembly. Taken be-fore that body by the sheriff, he saidhe had
kept the records in a sort ofLatin shorthand that not even anangel
from heaven could read, letalone the legislature.
The Chief Justice when sum-moned merely replied he had
beenexpelled from the Assembly and theywould have to vote him in
again be-fore he would re-enter their doors.
All this quarreling, and in the 2dand Market sts. Friends'
MeetingHouse at that, where the Assemblysometimes met, caused poor
Wil-liam Penn to write: For the loveof God, me and the poor
country, benot so governmentish and noisy. . .
Chief Justice More was a closefriend of Penn, from whom he
ob-tained a grant of 10,000 acres knownas the Manor of Moreland.
Embrac-ing the present 35th and 41st wards,it-extended over the
present Phila-delphia county line.
The Manor was the northernmostpart of the county and was five
mileslong and two miles at Its greatestwidth. Its principal
village, Somer-ton, was named in honor of a JudgeSommer, and was
partially in By-berry township.
Nicholas More had been a physi-cian in England, and upon Penn's
ar-rival here he became speaker of thefirst Assembly held in the
State. Inthree days that Assembly passed theGreat Law of
Pennsylvania, previ-ously framed in England. It was ari'inimity,
that the Assembly was
The Liberty Landl
.Philadelphia;4__?osSk
Old drawing of the supposed firstmeeting place of the General
As-sembly of Pennsylvania at Upland,now Chester. Nicholas More,
own-er of Moreland Manor, was its
speakernot to experience again for a longday.They passed laws
against thedrinking of healths, against thespreading of false news,
againstscolders and clamorous people.
Penn, with his Friendly tradition,was against quarreling. It
grievedhim when his friends on the Councilquarreled, as More often
did. Pennsought, with the aid of More, to dis-courage law suits and
permitted liti-gants to plead in court in their ownway. Later it
was proposed thatsimple justice should not be madea trade,
apparently an effort to dis-courage the profession of lawyers.But
if Penn had had better law-yers write his early laws perhapsthey
would not all now be obsoleteand there might not have been somuch
quarreling between the un-democratic Council and the
GeneralAssembly. The latter could onlyveto laws and could not
originatethem in the original plan set up byPenn.
Nicholas More was on so manycommittees and held so many
officesthat he was a sort of Colonial GrandPoo Bali.
