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Squabbling Solons and Sages Gave Penn the Jitters

Olden Time Philadelphia Village of Moreland Named for Temperamental Chief Justice

a Map 1681 BY HARRISON W. FRY

clerk to the Chief Justice p_cHE of Pennsylvania when sum

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moned before the General Assembly for questioning in 1685 became "obstreperous and unmanageable" and threw himself on the floor. But then Chief Justice Nicholas More himself was a bit temperamental. Able and upright, he was dictatorial, arbitrary and quarrelsome. So it was in keeping with the spirit of his chief that the clerk, Patrick Robinson, refused to give the court records to the Assembly. Taken before that body by the sheriff, he said he had kept the records in a sort of Latin shorthand that "not even an angel from heaven could read," let alone the legislature. The Chief Justice when summoned merely replied he had been expelled from the Assembly and they would have to vote him in again before he would re-enter their doors. All this quarreling, and in the 2d and Market sts. Friends' Meeting House at that, where the Assembly sometimes met, caused poor William Penn to write: "For the love of God, me and the poor country, be not so governmentish and noisy. . ." Chief Justice More was a close friend of Penn, from whom he obtained a grant of 10,000 acres known as the Manor of Moreland. Embracing the present 35th and 41st wards, it-extended over the present Philadelphia county line. The Manor was the northernmost part of the county and was five miles long and two miles at Its greatest width. Its principal village, Somerton, was named in honor of a Judge Sommer, and was partially in Byberry township. Nicholas More had been a physician in England, and upon Penn's arrival here he became speaker of the first Assembly held in the State. In three days that Assembly passed the Great Law of Pennsylvania, previously framed in England. It was a ri'inimity, that the Assembly was

The Liberty Landl

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Old drawing of the supposed first meeting place of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania at Upland, now Chester. Nicholas More, owner of Moreland Manor, was its speaker not to experience again for a long day. They passed laws against the drinking of healths, against the spreading of false news, against scolders and clamorous people. Penn, with his Friendly tradition, was against quarreling. It grieved him when his friends on the Council quarreled, as More often did. Penn sought, with the aid of More, to discourage law suits and permitted litigants to plead in court in their own way. Later it was proposed that "simple justice should not be made a trade," apparently an effort to discourage the profession of lawyers. But if Penn had had better lawyers write his early laws perhaps they would not all now be obsolete and there might not have been so much quarreling between the undemocratic Council and the General Assembly. The latter could only veto laws and could not originate them in the original plan set up by Penn. Nicholas More was on so many committees and held so many offices that he was a sort of Colonial Grand Poo Bali.