ERLE, SIR WILLIAM English lawyer and judge, was born at Fifehead-Magdalen, Dorset, on Oct. 1, 1793, and was educated at Winchester and at New college, Oxford. Having been called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1819 he went the western circuit, became counsel to the Bank of England, sat in parliament from 1837 to 1841 for the city of Oxford, and was made a judge of the common pleas in 1845. He was made Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in 1859, retired in 1866 and died at Bramshott, Hampshire, on Jan. 28, 1880.
See E. Manson, Builders of our Law (1904).