WENSLEYDALE, JAMES PARKE, BARON (1782 1868), English judge, was born near Liverpool on March 22, 1782. He was educated at Macclesfield Grammar school and Trinity college, Cambridge. He was a junior counsel for the Crown in the Queen's trial. In 1834 he was transferred from the king's bench to the court of exchequer, where for some 20 years he exercised considerable influence. The changes introduced by the Common Law Procedure Acts of 1854, 1855, proved too much for his legal conservatism and he resigned in December of the latter year. The Government, anxious to have his services, as a law lord in the House of Lords, proposed to confer on him a life peerage, but this was opposed by the House of Lords (see PEER AGE), and he was eventually created a peer with the usual re mainder (1856). He died at his residence, Ampthill Park, Bed
fordshire, on Feb. 25, 1868, and having outlived his three sons, the title became extinct. Parke was perhaps the last of the great "block-letter lawyers," the men to whom technicalities were the breath of life. Of his devotion to the intricacies of pleading the stories are innumerable; best is perhaps that of his taking one of his special demurrers to read to a dying friend. "It was so exquisitely drawn," he said "that it must cheer him to read it." In Serjeant Hayes' Cugate's Case, printed in Holdsworth's His tory of English Law, Parke figures as "Baron Sussebutter." See E. Nanson, Builders of Our Law (London, 1904).