THE GREAT WAR

Britain had not experienced war on such a scale and so close to home since Napoleon was on the rampage across Europe, and the immediate dislocation of international trade and finance found the government hopelessly underprepared. All was improvisation and expedients: the courts were kept closed for a few days while the first expedient, a moratorium on the enforcement of commercial debts above £5, was arranged and when they reopened the judges were without usable guidance in how to interpret it; in the county courts each made up his own directions and Selfe's attempt to bring consistency only made for more confusion. Rules were promised but before they materialised the moratorium was largely superseded by the more wide-ranging Courts (Emergency Powers) Act and a torrent of rules flowed from that.

Under this Act and its successors judges were ‘endowed with a new and vast responsibility affecting the whole range of social and economic conditions throughout the country’, acquiring a broad discretion over the enforcement of all judgments where the debt or debts were caused by the war. The measure was not given the widest publicity however, and there were those who believed, or affected to believe, that the moratorium was a comprehensive and continuing absolution from liabilities. Nevertheless applications flooded in at first – 270,121 orders were made in 1915 – and while the high court judges, accustomed to ordering payment in full without delay, found their new powers disturbing, they were nothing unfamiliar to county courts.