The mother of all mischief

We are hard up for entertainment here it would seem, but the fellow who sits across from me at work came upon an old court judgment this morning, by one Lord Justice Knight-Bruce, from the British Court of Chancery in 1852 (Ex parte Danks; Re Farley (1852) 42 ER 1138), and decided to read it out to me, with melodramatic and mounting emphasis, till by the time he reached the end we were in fits of laughter. They don’t write court judgments like they used to.

But it is actually no laughing matter, and there is a lesson here for all of us. It is about a simple neighbourly dispute that escalated through the courts, till the judge had this to say:

... and upon no greater matter—upon a matter that, if they had not good sense enough to settle it for themselves, some respectable neighbour would probably, upon application, have adjusted for them in an hour—began (as I collect), the career of cost and heat and hatred, of reproach, scandal and misery, in which they are now engaged, of which neither this day nor this year, nor perhaps another, will, I fear, see the end, and which seems well to exemplify an old English saying, that the mother of mischief is no bigger than a midge's wing.