I've also been wondering if this isn't quite correct. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is a politician, not a judge, and isn't (such is the way of things) linked to the Court of Chancery, which is where such issues would have been litigated.
Rather differently, I have memoirs from my great-aunt who claimed that her grandfather owned most of Cheapside in the City of London in the late 18th century. Those memoirs, written in the 1970s, are often correct but often not so; the only thing I can find about this City figure is that he was in a debtors' prison! A distant cousin placed lots of adverts in newspapers of the late 19th century selling shares in goldfields in Australia and India; these appear to have been fraudulent and the printed version of the phone calls we now get from scammers claiming to be Microsoft, or 'your broadband company,' or whatever.
