be found than an instruction whereby the governor would recommend to the 
local judge that a special verdict be rendered. In cases judicially before the 
Council, a direction for a special verdict when the case went down for a new 
trial was envisaged as a proper addition to the judgment, but the New Jersey 
situation not being a judicial proceeding before the Committee, counsel obviously 
saw no better way around the established common law limitation on 
the power of a judge to direct a special verdict than a recommendation that 
the judge exceed his authority. 
The notions of Mansfield appear to have undergone considerable alteration 
during the next decade, for after he became Chief Justice and was active as a 
member of the Council, he expressed judicially views which went much further 
than his opinions as counsel. 
This opinion is to be found in the notes taken by Jared Ingersoll at the hearing 
of the New Hampshire appeal of Dering v. Packer at the Cockpit in July, 
1760, to the effect that 
in all appeals from determinations in the plantations the court from which the 
appeal comes ought to certify the whole matter as it lay before the court, and if 
judgment was.founded upon a general verdict the court ought to state and certify 
the whole evidence as well the parole as any other, and that the Lords of Appeal 
had dismissed an appeal because that had not been done. 
Ingersoll commented that "this might be difficult to be done when the judges 
make no minutes; here the practise is for the judge to take minutes of the substance 
of all evidence as the same is delivered into the court and jury." 87 He 
made no reference to the usual New England practice of taking all the evidence 
in writing. But New Hampshire practice may have been veering toward orthodoxy, 
for respondent in this appeal asserted that the judgment below was in the 
nature of a general verdict, being founded chiefly in viva voce evidence, and 
could not be reversed by the Privy Council. 88 
As the law of England then stood, it is apparent that the certification of 
matter, dehors the record was improper. It is true that the writ of error in the 
form used temp. George II commands the certification of "the record and 
process of plaint aforesaid with all things concerning them," but these last 
words were not understood to embrace matter other than the bill of exceptions. 
Mansfield, however, was a person of broad and ranging mind who, in other 
particulars, demonstrated his impatience with the bondage in which his present 
was held by medieval conceptions. He seems, moreover, to have entertained a 
87 Ingersoll Papers, 242. For the printed 
"cases" of the parties, see Add. MS, 36,218/ 
88 Case of Respondent {Add. MS, 36,218/46). 
44-48.