In the early centuries of the office, the Lord Chancellor was a senior cleric, usually though not invariably an Englishman by birth. In the 15th and 16th centuries, a nobleman sometimes held the office, acting through a deputy. From the Reformation on, he was usually a trained lawyer, though the practice of appointing a senior cleric only ended with Michael Boyle, Archbishop of Armagh who retired in 1686. In addition to his judicial functions, the Lord Chancellor had a key political role. Until the Acts of Union 1800, he was Speaker of the Irish House of Lords even though he often did not hold a peerage. After the Union, he was still required to advise both British and Irish Governments on a range of political and legal matters. He was often called on to steer legislation through the House of Lords: Lord O'Hagan was created a peer so that he might assist in passing the Supreme Court of
Other office-holders
The office of Master of the Rolls in Ireland existed from the 14th century. Originally his functions were clerical, but in time he became in effect an assistant Lord Chancellor. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the office was notoriously a sinecure for English politicians, but from 1800 on a determined effort was made to appoint judges of real ability. From the 1850s, the Lord Chancellor sat as a judge of appeal, with a Lord Justice of Appeal to assist him. The drawback to this process was that the two might disagree as Lord O'Hagan and Jonathan Christian frequently did. In contrast, when the Court of Appeal was set up in 1878, it sat as a bench of three. In 1867 a new office of Vice-Chancellor was created to assist the Master of the Rolls at first instance. It was abolished in 1904; throughout that period, the office was only held by one man, Hedges Eyre Chatterton.
Business of the Court
Originally the Lord Chancellor was "keeper of the king's conscience", charged with giving relief in any case where the courts of common law could not supply a remedy. In time, as in England, equity developed into a fully fledged legal system in its own right, parallel to the common law. O'Flanagan, writing in 1870, noted that he had examined the Calendar of the Court of Chancery in the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, and found the ordinary business of the Court then to be quite similar to that of his own time: injunctions to stay proceedings in a common law court, proceedings to compel a trustee to make over an estate to the plaintiff, discovery of deeds, and actions to set aside deeds obtained by fraud. Apart from the ordinary business of the Court, certain functions were reserved to the Lord Chancellor: care of minors and wards of court, discipline of solicitors and coroners, and removal of justices of the peace. In 1924 the special functions of the Lord Chancellor were vested in the Chief Justice of Ireland; in 1936 responsibility for minors and wards of court was transferred to the President of the High Court and in 1960 discipline of solicitors was transferred to the President of the High Court.
