Peter Collier is a retired British barrister and judge with a rich background in law, having practiced for nearly 40 years as a barrister before becoming a judge and spending 11 years in office.
Peter has been actively involved in ecclesiastical legal matters and was Chancellor of the Diocese of York from 2006 to 2023.
26.03.01 NE Circuit 150th Anniversary Service
150 years ago today – although it was on February 29th rather than March 1st – the North Eastern Circuit as we know it today came into being. It did so when the barristers to the east of the Pennines separated from their brethren on the other side of the hills, and until 1922 they all would have been brethren.
However, the existence of Circuits has a much longer history, going back to the reign of Henry II and the Assize of Clarendon. That was when the King decreed that his judges should travel to places outside London and should hold court and do justice across the length and breadth of the realm. So they travelled to the furthest parts of the kingdom, including coming “up north”. They usually travelled in pairs. And the justice they presided over saw amongst other things the development of trial by jury. Its continuing development is a hotly contested issue at this present time. Although trial by jury meant something rather different in the middle-ages from what we know today.
Here in the north the King’s justices would visit such places as York, Durham, Newcastle, Lancaster and Carlisle. They would try the most serious of civil and criminal cases. The less serious cases were tried by local justices in petty and quarter sessions. The North Riding Quarter Sessions would be held in a number of towns including here in Ripon where the old Sessions Court is now a museum.
And although for us in more settled times the idea of the Circuit is very much about community, fellowship and mutual support, the idea then was perhaps more approximate to that of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is quite an “in thing” at the moment with a number of books and television programmes about it. The themes of pilgrimage are very much about journeying and development. Judges coming on Circuit was about a body of people on the move: travelling judges, itinerant advocates, and justice being carried from place to place rather than being fixed in a single centre. There is something good and humane about that — justice not remote, but present; not abstract, but encountered.
Psalm 121 which the choir sang a few minutes ago is a psalm of pilgrimage. It was sung by the people as they travelled on the road to Jerusalem, sung as they journeyed through uncertain terrain. The psalmist lifted up his eyes to the hills — not because the hills were safe, but because they were not. Hills then as now could be places of exposure, danger, and vulnerability. So the question is posed: “From where will my help come?” And the answer comes not from the landscape, nor from human strength, but from beyond both. As the pilgrims sang — “My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.”
For many years that looking to the Lord for help was part of the pattern of our itinerant justice system. When the judges arrived in town they would go to church and prayers would be said, asking God to bless their work and to guide them in their decision making. That tradition continues today with the annual legal service in Westminster Abbey at the start of the legal year. And most circuits hold one or more church services at some point in the year. We have such a service in the North East in York, also in October, and there are other services in other places during the year.
You may be wondering whether such church going is relevant in a time when the world in which we live is not only very different from the days of Henry II but also very different from the days of Queen Victoria.
In the latter half of the 19th century much change was taking place across our society and its institutions. In 1876 here in Ripon you were celebrating your 40th birthday as a diocese, the first new diocese to be formed since the Reformation.
The 1870s was not only when the NE Circuit was founded, but was also the time when the RCJ were being constructed in the Strand in London, and the High Court as we know it came into being, replacing a court structure that could be traced back to Henry II and beyond.
Much has changed since the 1870s and not only are the courts we know different from those of Victorian days but those who come into them whether as judges, advocates, litigants or other bit players are now people of a significant diversity of faiths and of no faith. And you should add to that, that our approach to the law is now set very much in a context of legal positivism and black letter law.
So is looking to the Lord in any way appropriate today? Is any hint of divine or even natural law something we can think of as meaningful?
Come with me and let me introduce you to Nicodemus from our gospel reading. He was not a lawyer, but he was very well versed in the law.
In our reading Jesus spoke to Nicodemus about a spiritual world, about a spiritual reality, about something more than and beyond the world we can know and measure through physical science. And I dare to venture that that other world is a world that many of us have at times had some awareness of at some point or points in our lives.
Jesus and Nicodemus did not initially connect well with each other; Nicodemus was struggling to grasp that there was anything more than the physical world he could see, feel and physically interact with. So he asked Jesus how anyone can enter into and experience that other world.
Jesus replied by accepting that it is a world that in one sense you cannot see, but he says, you can see its effect. He says it is like the wind – you cannot see the wind, but you do see clearly what it does and what a difference it makes.
And so Jesus says it is a matter of spotting those moments when you sense that spiritual reality and following that wind wherever it blows.
Let’s be clear, the idea of a spiritual world for those of us entrusted with the law, is not a call to abandon reason or discipline; but it is a reminder that law itself rests on foundations it did not create. The law presupposes human dignity; it does not create it. The law presupposes and assumes the value of truth; but it did not invent it. It depends upon trust — trust in witnesses, in institutions, in good faith — even as it tests and scrutinises that trust through its processes.
At its best, the law is a servant of something larger than itself: the common good, the protection of the vulnerable, the restraint of power, the hope that justice, though imperfectly realised, is not an illusion. When law forgets that it is a servant, it can become brittle, defensive, and eventually unjust. And that calls on us to recognise that there are spiritual values underlying what we do and the several different parts that we play.
Now it would seem that Nicodemus learned something from that encounter with Jesus. This is not the last time we read about him. A little later in John’s gospel we read about how Jesus was attracting big crowds, and upsetting the religious authorities – to the extent that they sent the temple police to arrest him. The police however returned empty handed explaining that they had never heard anyone speak with such authority as they had heard from Jesus. When they were rebuked by the Pharisees, Nicodemus spoke up and reminded everyone that their law did not judge someone without giving them a chance to be heard. He’d grasped some of those unseen and underlying principles, and he felt compelled to speak out about what he had come to know. He was following the wind.
So today we have come together to give thanks for 150 years of fellowship, learning, advocacy, and judgement. We acknowledge the burdens that come with such responsibility: the weight of decisions, the cost of conflict, the risk of cynicism. But our readings today invite all of us — lawyers and non-lawyers alike — to lift our eyes beyond the immediate hills, beyond our professional identity, roles, and tasks, and to remember the source of our help. To remember that law matters, justice matters; but they flourish most when they are rooted in humility, and an awareness of the all-encompassing spiritual world, where we can be sustained by grace, and enabled to pursue that common good.
Amen