Sir John, chief justice of the King's Bench, was born of gentle blood in 1531 at Wellington, in the county of Somerset. While still a child he was stolen by a band of gipsies, who kept him some months, branded his arm with a cabalistic mark, and so invigorated a constitution that had been previously sickly, that from that period he grew up to be a man of extraordinary stature and activity. He was sent to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1547, where he amassed a good stock of classical learning and of dogmatic divinity. On becoming a Middle Templar in 1551 he got into bad company, and utterly neglected his juridical studies. He preferred theatres and gaming-houses; he was given to drinking, and took to the roads. Nor did he leave off when he was called to the bar. "In his youthful days," says Fuller (Worthies, vol. ii. 284), "he was as stout and skilful a man at sword and buckler as any in that age, and wild enough in his recreations." An unhappy wife, and the birth of a child for whom he felt attachment, put a check upon his extraordinary life. He accordingly, at the age of thirty, prepared "a very good entertainment for his comrades;" took a final leave of them, and took to study. "He was a strong, stout man," says Aubrey (iii. 492), "and could endure to sit at it day and night." He became a consummate lawyer, according to Coke, and, despite the stories which were circulated regarding his previous career, he was made Serjeant Popham in 1571. He was chosen solicitor-general at her Majesty's Queen Elizabeth's express wish in 1579, and speaker of the House of Commons in 1581. He succeeded Sir Gilbert Gerrard as attorney-general in 1585; and was present at the court of Fotheringay during the trial of the Queen of Scots. On the 8th of June 1592 he received his writ as chief justice of England, was knighted by the Queen at Greenwich, and was sworn of the Privy Council. He was supposed to conduct himself in it very creditably, but was charged with extreme severity. In ordinary larcenies, and strange to say, in highway robberies, there was little chance of an acquittal. In short, he was notorious as a "hanging judge." When the young Earl of Essex planned an insurrection in the city in 1641, Popham conducted himself with very great courage. On the death of his royal mistress he did not allow the sword of justice to rust in its scabbard. Sir Walter Raleigh was tried before him for being concerned in the plot to place the Lady Arabella Stuart on the throne, and found guilty; Guy Fawkes and his associates were tried and found guilty; Garret, superior of the Jesuits, was tried and found guilty, when Popham was struck with a mortal disease, of which he died on the 1st of June 1607, in the seventy-second year of his age. This "huge, heavy, ugly man" left behind him the greatest estate ever amassed by lawyer; some say as much as L10,000 a year, which was in due measure squandered by his son John. Littlecote House, the family residence, and about which hangs a tale, is said to have become the property of Sir John Popham as the price of legal corruption. He compiled a volume of wretchedly ill-done Reports of his Decisions while he was chief justice of the King's Bench. (See Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chief Justices of England.)