THE LORD CHANCELLOR'S DEPARTMENT

Although three departments initially shared the duties involved in running the new courts, the Home Office had the lion's share, handling accommodation and sittings, prison facilities for debtors, complaints by and about judges and, in conjunction with the Treasury, fees and salaries. Most initiatives came from outside however, and the Home Secretaries of the period do not seem to have been very enthusiastic about their new charge.

The Home Office of the 1840s was a small unit organised along old-fashioned lines with particular clerks holding expertise in the several branches of its work within their own heads. New areas of responsibility were invariably treated by the clerks as inferior and, although one of them was given an extra allowance for the correspondence generated by the County Courts Act, it is unlikely that anyone took much interest in it. The Home Secretary's need to offer economies in the clerical organisation and the fact that no patronage went with his responsibilities probably explain why he willingly surrendered them to the Lord Chancellor, a curiously timed change, with major inquiries into the organisation of legal services imminent.

In June 1868 three bags of Home Office papers arrived, unaccompanied by any clerks.