Says Whitelock, at the conclusion of his account of the grand masque

given by the four inns, "Thus these dreams past, and these pomps

vanished." Scarcely had the frolic terminated when death laid a chill

hand on the time-serving Noy, who in the consequences of his dishonest

counsels left a cruel legacy to the master and the country whom he alike

betrayed. A few more years--and John Finch, having lost the Great Seal,

was an exile in a foreign land, destined to die in penury, without

again setting foot on his native soil. The graceful Herbert, whose

smooth cheek had flushed with joy at Henrietta's musical courtesies,

became for a brief day the mock Lord Keeper of Charles II.'s mock court

at Paris, and then, dishonored and disowned by his capricious master, he

languished in poverty and disease, until he found an obscure grave in

the French capital. More fortunate than his early rival, Edward Hyde

outlived Charles Stuart's days of adverse fortune, and rose to a

grievous greatness; but like that early rival, he, too, died in exile in

France. Perhaps of all the managers of the grand masque the scholarly

pedant, John Selden, had the greatest share of earthly satisfaction. Not

the least fortunate of the party was the historian of "the pomp and

glory, if not the vanity of the show," who having survived the

Commonwealth and witnessed the Restoration, was permitted to retain his

paternal estate, and in his last days could tell his numerous

descendants how his old chum, Edward Hyde, had risen, fallen,

and--passed to another world.

CHAPTER XXXII.

AN EMPTY GRATE.

With the revival of gaiety which attended and followed the Restoration,

revels and masques came once more into vogue at the Inns of Court,

where, throughout the Commonwealth, plays had been prohibited, and

festivals had been either abolished or deprived of their ancient

hilarity. The caterers of amusement for the new king were not slow to

suggest that he should honor the lawyers with a visit; and in accordance

with their counsel, His Majesty took water on August 15, 1661, and went

in the royal barge from Whitehall to the Temple to dine at the Reader's

feast.

Heneage Finch had been chosen Autumn Reader of that inn, and in

accordance with ancient usage he demonstrated his ability to instruct

young gentlemen in the principles of English law, by giving a series of

costly banquets. From the days of the Tudors to the rise of Oliver

Cromwell, the Reader's feasts had been amongst the most sumptuous and

ostentatious entertainments of the town--the Sergeant's feasts scarcely

surpassing them in splendor, the inaugural dinners of lord mayors often

lagging behind them in expense. But Heneage Finch's lavish hospitality

outstripped the doings of all previous Readers. His revel was protracted

throughout six days, and on each of these days he received at his table

the representative members of some high social order or learned body.

Beginning with a dinner to the nobility and Privy Councillors, he

finished with a banquet to the king; and on the intervening days he

entertained the civic authorities, the College of Physicians, the civil

lawyers, and the dignitaries of the Church.

The king's visit was attended with imposing ceremony, and wanted no

circumstance that could have rendered the occasion more honorable to the

host or to the society of which he was a member. All the highest

officers of the court accompanied the monarch, and when he stepped from

his barge at the Temple Stairs, he spoke with jovial urbanity to his

entertainer and the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, who received

him with tokens of loyal deference and attachment. "On each side," says

Dugdale, "as His Majesty passed, stood the Reader's servants in scarlet

cloaks and white tabba doublets; there being a way made through the wall

into the Temple Gardens; and above them on each side the benchers,

barristers, and other gentlemen of the society, all in their gowns and

formalities, the loud music playing from the time of his landing till he

entered the hall; where he was received with xx violins, which continued

as long as his majesty stayed." Fifty chosen gentlemen of the inn,

wearing their academic gowns, placed dinner on the table, and waited on

the feasters--no other servants being permitted to enter the hall during

the progress of the banquet. On the dais at the top of the hall, under a

canopy of state, the king and his brother James sat apart from men of

lower degree, whilst the nobles of Whitehall occupied one long table,

under the presidency of the Lord Chancellor, and the chief personages of

the inn dined at a corresponding long table, having the reader for their

chairman.

In the following January, Charles II. and the Duke of York honored

Lincoln's Inn with a visit, whilst the mock Prince de la Grange held his

court within the walls of that society. Nine years later--in the

February of 1671--King Charles and his brother James again visited

Lincoln's Inn, on which occasion they were entertained by Sir Francis

Goodericke, Knt., the reader of the inn, who seems almost to have gone

beyond Heneage Finch in sumptuous profusion of hospitality. Of this

royal visit a particular account is to be seen in the Admittance Book of

the Honorable Society, from which it appears that the royal brothers

were attended by the Dukes of Monmouth and Richmond; the Earls of

Manchester, Bath, and Anglesea; Viscount Halifax, the Bishop of Ely,

Lord Newport, Lord Henry Howard, and "divers others of great qualitie."

The entertainment in most respects was a repetition of Sir Heneage

Finch's feast--the king, the Duke of York, and Prince Rupert dining on

the dais at the top of the hall, whilst the persons of inferior though

high quality were regaled at two long tables, set down the hall; and

the gentlemen of the inn condescending to act as menial servants. The

reader himself, dropping on his knee when he performed the servile

office, proffered the towel with which the king prepared himself for the

repast; and barristers of ancient lineage and professional eminence

contended for the honor of serving His Majesty with surloin and

cheesecake upon the knee, and hastened with the alacrity of well-trained

lacqueys to do the bidding of "the lords att their table." Having eaten

and drunk to his lively satisfaction, Charles called for the Admittance

Book of the Inn, and placed his name on the roll of members, thereby

conferring on the society an honor for which no previous king of England

had furnished a precedent. Following their chief's example, the Duke of

York and Prince Rupert and other nobles forthwith joined the fraternity

of lawyers; and hastily donning students' gowns, they mingled with the

troop of gowned servitors, and humbly waited on their liege lord.

In like manner, twenty-one years since (July 29, 1845) when Queen

Victoria and her lamented consort visited Lincoln's Inn, on the opening

of the new hall, they condescended to enter their names in the Admission

Book of the Inn, thereby making themselves students of the society. Her

Majesty has not been called to the bar; but Prince Albert in due course

became a barrister and bencher. Repeating the action of Charles II.'s

courtiers, the great Duke of Wellington and the bevy of great nobles

present at the celebration became fellow-students with the queen; and on

leaving the table the prince walked down the hall, wearing a student's

stuff gown (by no means the most picturesque of academic robes), over

his field-marshal's uniform. Her Majesty forbore to disarrange her

toilet--which consisted of a blue bonnet with blue feathers, a dress of

Limerick lace, and a scarlet shawl, with a deep gold edging--by putting

her arms through the sleeveless arm-holes of a bombazine frock.

Grateful to the lawyers for the cordiality with which they welcomed him

to the country, William III. accepted an invitation to the Middle

Temple, and was entertained by that society with a banquet and a masque,

of which notice has been taken in another chapter of this work; and in

1697-8 Peter the Great was a guest at the Christmas revels of the

Templars. On that occasion the Czar enjoyed a favorable opportunity for

gratifying his love of strong drink, and for witnessing the ease with

which our ancestors drank wine by the magnum and punch by the gallon,

when they were bent on enjoyment.

In the greater refinement and increasing delicacy of the eighteenth

century, the Inns of Court revels, which had for so many generations

been conspicuous amongst the gaieties of the town, became less and less

magnificent; and they altogether died out under the second of those

Georges who are thought by some persons to have corrupted public morals

and lowered the tastes of society. In 1733-4, when Lord Chancellor

Talbot's elevation to the woolsack was celebrated by a revel in the

Inner Temple Hall, the dulness and disorder of the celebration convinced

the lawyers that they had not acted wisely in attempting to revive

usages that had fallen into desuetude because they were inconvenient to

new arrangements or repugnant to modern taste. No attempt was made to

prolong the festivity over a succession of days. It was a revel of one

day; and no one wished to add another to the period of riot. At two

o'clock on Feb. 2, 1733-4, the new Chancellor, the master of the revels,

the benchers of the inns, and the guests (who were for the most part

lawyers), sat down to dinner in the hall. The barristers and students

had their ordinary fare, with the addition of a flask of claret to each

mess; but a superior repast was served at the High Table where fourteen

students (of whom the Chancellor's eldest son was one), served as

waiters. Whilst the banquet was in progress, musicians stationed in the

gallery at the upper end of the hall filled the room with deafening

noise, and ladies looked down upon the feasters from a large gallery

which had been fitted up for their reception over the screen. After

dinner, as soon as the hall could be cleared of dishes and decanters,

the company were entertained with 'Love for Love,' and 'The Devil to

Pay,' performed by professional actors who "all came from the Haymarket

in chairs, ready dressed, and (as it was said), refused any gratuity for

their trouble, looking upon the honor of distinguishing themselves on

this occasion as sufficient." The players having withdrawn, the judges,

sergeants, benchers, and other dignitaries, danced 'round about the coal

fire;' that is to say, they danced round about a stove in which there

was not a single spark of fire. The congregation of many hundreds of

persons, in a hall which had not comfortable room for half the number,

rendered the air so oppressively hot that the master of the revels

wisely resolved to lead his troop of revellers round an empty grate. The

chronicler of this ridiculous mummery observes: "And all the time of the

dance the ancient song, accompanied by music, was sung by one Toby

Aston, dressed in a bar-gown, whose father had formerly been Master of

the Plea Office in the King's Bench. When this was over, the ladies came

down from the gallery, went into the parliament chamber, and stayed

about a quarter of an hour, while the hall was being put in order. They

then went into the hall and danced a few minuets. Country dances began

at ten, and at twelve a Very fine cold collation was provided for the

whole company, from which they returned to dancing, which they

continued as long as they pleased, and the whole day's entertainment was

generally thought to be very genteelly and liberally conducted. The

Prince of Wales honored the performance with his company part of the

time; he came into the music _incog._ about the middle of the play, and

went away as soon as the farce of 'walking round the coal fire' was

over."

With this notable dance of lawyers round an empty grate, the old revels

disappeared. In their Grand Days, equivalent to the gaudy days, or feast

days, or audit days of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, the Inns of

Court still retain the last vestiges of their ancient jollifications,

but the uproarious riot of the obsolete festivities is but faintly

echoed by the songs and laughter of the junior barristers and students

who in these degenerate times gladden their hearts and loosen their

tongues with an extra glass of wine after grand dinners, and then hasten

back to chambers for tobacco and tea.

On the discontinuance of the revels the Inns of Court lost their chief

attractions for the courtly pleasure-seekers of the town, and many a day

passed before another royal visit was paid to any one of the societies.

In 1734 George III.'s father stood amongst the musicians in the Inner

Temple Hall; and after the lapse of one century and eleven years the

present queen accepted the hospitality of Lincoln's Inn. No record

exists of a royal visit made to an Inn of Court between those events.

Only the other day, however, the Prince of Wales went eastwards and

partook of a banquet in the hall of Middle Temple, of which society he

is a barrister and a bencher.

PART VII.

LEGAL EDUCATION.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

INNS OF COURT AND INNS OF CHANCERY.

Schools for the study of the Common Law, existed within the bounds of

the city of London, at the commencement of the thirteenth century. No

sooner had a permanent home been assigned to the Court of Common Pleas,

than legal practitioners fixed themselves in the neighborhood of

Westminster, or within the walls of London. A legal society speedily

grew up in the city; and some of the older and more learned professors

of the Common Law, devoting a portion of their time and energies to the

labors of instruction, opened academies for the reception of students.

Dugdale notices a tradition that in ancient times a law-school, called

Johnson's Inn, stood in Dowgate, that another existed in Pewter Lane,

and that Paternoster Row contained a third; and it is generally thought

that these three inns were amongst the academies which sprung up as soon

as the Common Pleas obtained a permanent abode.

The schools thus established in the opening years of the thirteenth

century, were not allowed to flourish for any great length of time; for

in the nineteenth year of his reign, Henry III. suppressed them by a

mandate addressed to the mayor and sheriffs of the city. But though this

king broke up the schools, the scholars persevered in their study; and

if the king's mandate aimed at a complete discontinuance of legal

instruction, his policy was signally defeated.

Successive writers have credited Edward III.'s reign with the

establishment of Inns of Court; and it has been erroneously inferred

that the study of the Common Law not only languished, but was altogether

extinct during the period of nearly one hundred years that intervened

between Henry III.'s dissolution of the city schools and Edward III.'s

accession. Abundant evidence, however, exists that this was not the

case. Edward I., in the twentieth year of his reign, ordered his judges

of the Common Pleas to "provide and ordain, from every county, certain

attorneys and lawyers" (in the original "atturnatus et _apprenticiis_")

"of the best and most apt for their learning and skill, who might do

service to his court and people; and those so chosen, and no other

should follow his court, and transact affairs therein; the words of

which order make it clear that the country contained a considerable body

of persons who devoted themselves to the study and practice of the law."

So also in the Year-book, 1 Ed. III., the words, "et puis une apprentise

demand," show that lawyers holding legal degrees existed in the very

first year of Edward III.'s reign; a fact which justifies the inference

that in the previous reign England contained Common Law schools capable

of granting the legal degree of apprentice. Again Dugdale remarks, "In

20 Ed. III., in a _quod ei deforciat_ to an exception taken, it was

answered by Sir Richard de Willoughby (then a learned justice of the

_Common Pleas_) and William Skipwith, (afterwards also one of the

justices of that court), that the same was no exception amongst the

_Apprentices in Hostells or Inns_." Whence it is manifest that Inns of

Court were institutions in full vigor at the time when they have been

sometimes represented as originally established.

But after their expulsion from the city, there is reason to think that

the common lawyers made no attempt to reside in colleges within its

boundaries. They preferred to establish themselves on spots where they

could enjoy pure air and rural quietude, could surround themselves with

trees and lawns, or refresh their eyes with the sight of the silver

Thames. In the earliest part of the fourteenth century, they took

possession of a great palace that stood on the western outskirt of the

town, and looked westwards upon green fields, whilst its eastern wall

abutted on New Street--a thoroughfare that was subsequently called

Chancellor's Lane, and has for many years been known as Chancery Lane.

This palace had been the residence of Henry Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, who

conferred upon the building the name which it still bears. The earl died

in 1310, some seventeen years before Edward III.'s accession; and

Thynne, the antiquary, was of opinion that no considerable period

intervened between Henry Lacy's death and the entry of the lawyers. In

the same century, the lawyers took possession of the Temple. The exact

date of their entry is unknown; but Chaucer's verse enables the student

to fix, with sufficient preciseness, the period when the more noble

apprentices of the law first occupied the Temple as tenants of the

Knight's Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, who obtained a grant of

the place from Edward III.[21] The absence of fuller particulars

concerning the early history of the legal Templars, is ordinarily and

with good reason attributed to Wat Tyler's rebels, who destroyed the

records of the fraternity by fire. From roof to basement, beginning with

the tiles, and working downwards, the mob destroyed the principal houses

of the college; and when they had burnt all the archives on which they

could lay hands, they went off and expended their remaining fury on

other buildings, of which the Knights of St. John were proprietors.

The same men who saw the lawyers take possession of the Temple on the

northern banks of the Thames, and of the Earl of Lincoln's palace in New

Street, saw them also make a third grand settlement. The manor of

Portepoole, or Purpoole, became the property of the Grays of Wilton, in

the twenty-second year of Edward I.; and on its green fields, lying

north of Holborn, a society of lawyers established a college which still

retains the name of the ancient proprietors of the soil. Concerning the

exact date of its institution, the uncertainty is even greater than

that which obscures the foundation of the Temple and Lincoln's Inn; but

antiquaries have agreed to assign the creation of Gray's Inn, as an

hospicium for the entertainment of lawyers, to the time of Edward III.

The date at which the Temple lawyers split up into two separate

societies, is also unknown; but assigning the division to some period

posterior to Wat Tyler's insurrection, Dugdale says, "But,

notwithstanding, this spoil by the rebels, those students so increased

here, that at length they divided themselves into two bodies; the one

commonly known by the Society of the Inner Temple, and the other of the

Middle Temple, holding this mansion as tenants." But as both societies

had a common origin in the migration of lawyers from Thavies Inn,

Holborn, in the time of Edward III., it is usual to speak of the two

Temples as instituted in that reign, and to regard all four Inns of

Court as the work of the fourteenth century.

The Inns of Chancery for many generations maintained towards the Inns of

Court a position similar to that which Eton School maintains towards

King's at Cambridge, or that which Winchester School holds to New

College at Oxford. They were seminaries in which lads underwent

preparation for the superior discipline and greater freedom of the four

colleges. Each Inn of Court had its own Inns of Chancery, yearly

receiving from them the pupils who had qualified themselves for

promotion to the status of Inns-of-Court men. In course of time,

students after receiving the preliminary education in an Inn of Chancery

were permitted to enter an Inn of Court on which their Inn of Chancery

was not dependent; but at every Inn of Court higher admission fees were

charged to students coming from Inns of Chancery over which it had no

control, than to students who came from its own primary schools. If the

reader bears in mind the difference in respect to age, learning, and

privileges between our modern public schoolboys and university

undergraduates, he will realize with sufficient nearness to truth the

differences which existed between the Inns of Chancery students and the

Inns of Court students in the fifteenth century; and in the students,

utter-barristers, and benchers of the Inns of Court at the same period

he may see three distinct orders of academic persons closely resembling

the undergraduates, bachelors of arts, and masters of arts in our

universities.

In the 'De Laudibus Legum Angliae,'[22] written in the latter part of the

fifteenth century, Sir John Fortescue says--"But to the intent, most

excellent Prince, yee may conceive a forme and an image of this study,

as I am able, I wil describe it unto you. For there be in it ten lesser

houses or innes, and sometimes moe, which are called Innes of the

Chauncerye. And to every one of them belongeth an hundred students at

least, and to some of them a much greater number, though they be not

ever all together in the same."

In Charles II.'s time there were eight Inns of Chancery; and of them

three were subsidiary to the Inner Temple--viz., Clifford's Inn,

Clement's Inn, and Lyon's Inn. Clifford's Inn (originally the town

residence of the Barons Clifford) was first inhabited by law-students in

the eighteenth year of Edward III. Clement's Inn (taking its name from

the adjacent St. Clement's Well) was certainly inhabited by law-students

as early as the nineteenth year of Edward IV. Lyon's Inn was an Inn of

Chancery in the time of Henry V.

One alone (New Inn) was attached to the Middle Temple. In the previous

century, the Middle Temple had possessed another Inn of Chancery called

Strand Inn; but in the third year of Edward VI. this nursery was pulled

down by the Duke of Somerset, who required the ground on which it stood

for the site of Somerset House.

Lincoln's Inn had for dependent schools Furnival's Inn and Thavies

Inn--the latter of which hostels was inhabited by law-students in Edward

III.'s time. Of Furnival's Inn (originally Lord Furnival's town mansion,

and converted into a law-school in Edward VI.'s reign) Dugdale says:

"After which time the Principall and Fellows of this Inne have paid to

the society of Lincoln's Inne the rent of iiil vis iiid as an yearly

rent for the same, as may appear by the accompts of that house; and by

speciall order there made, have had these following priviledges: first

(viz. 10 Eliz.), that the utter-barristers of Furnivall's Inne, of a

yeares continuance, and so certified and allowed by the Benchers of

Lincoln's Inne, shall pay no more than four marks apiece for their

admittance into that society. Next (viz. in Eliz.) that every fellow of

this inne, who hath been allowed an utter-barrister here, and that hath

mooted here two vacations at the Utter Bar, shall pay no more for their

admission into the Society of Lincoln's Inne, than xiiis iiiid, though

all utter-barristers of any other Inne of Chancery (excepting Thavyes

Inne) should pay xxs, and that every inner-barrister of this house, who

hath mooted here one vacation at the Inner Bar, should pay for his

admission into this House but xxs, those of other houses (excepting

Thavyes Inne) paying xxvis viiid."

The subordinate seminaries of Gray's Inn, in Dugdale's time, were Staple

Inn and Barnard's Inn. Originally the Exchange of the London woolen

merchants, Staple Inn was a law-school as early as Henry V.'s time. It

is probable that Bernard's Inn became an academy for law-students in

the reign of Henry VI.

[21] Chaucer mentions the Temple thus:--

"A manciple there was of the Temple, Of which all catours might take

ensemple For to be wise in buying of vitaile; For whether he pay'd or

took by taile, Algate he wayted so in his ashate, That he was aye before

in good estate. Now is not that of God a full faire grace, That such a

leude man's wit shall pace The wisdome of an heape of learned men? Of

masters had he more than thrice ten, That were of law expert and

curious, Of which there was a dozen in that house, Worthy to been

stewards of rent and land Of any lord that is in England; To maken him

live by his proper good In honour debtless, but if he were wood; Or live

as scarcely as him list desire, And able to helpen all a shire, In any

case that might have fallen or hap, And yet the manciple set all her

capp."

[22] The 'De Laudibus' was written in Latin; but for the convenience of

readers not familiar with that classic tongue, the quotations from the

treatise are given from Robert Mulcaster's English version.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

LAWYERS AND GENTLEMEN.

Thus planted in the fourteenth century beyond the confines of the city,

and within easy access of Westminster Hall, the Inns of Court and

Chancery formed an university, which soon became almost as powerful and

famous as either Oxford or Cambridge. For generations they were spoken

of collectively as the law-university, and though they were voluntary

societies--in their nature akin to the club-houses of modern

London--they adopted common rules of discipline, and an uniform system

of instruction. Students flocked to them in abundance; and whereas the

students of Oxford and Cambridge were drawn from the plebeian ranks of

society, the scholars of the law-university were almost invariably the

sons of wealthy men and had usually sprung from gentle families. To be a

law-student was to be a stripling of quality. The law university enjoyed

the same patrician _prestige_ and _eclat_ that now belong to the more

aristocratic houses of the old universities.

Noblemen sent their sons to it in order that they might acquire the

style and learning and accomplishments of polite society. A proportion

of the students were encouraged to devote themselves to the study of the

law and to attend sedulously the sittings of Judges in Westminster Hall;

but the majority of well-descended boys who inhabited the Inns of

Chancery were heirs to good estates, and were trained to become their

wealth rather than to increase it--to perfect themselves in graceful

arts, rather than to qualify themselves to hold briefs. The same was the

case in the Inns of Court, which were so designated--not because they

prepared young men to rise in courts of law, but because they taught

them to shine in the palaces of kings. It is a mistake to suppose that

the Inns of Court contain at the present time a larger proportion of

idle members, who have no intention to practise at the bar, than they

contained under the Plantagenets and Tudors. On the contrary, in the

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the number of Templars who merely

played at being lawyers, or were lawyers only in name, was actually as

well as relatively greater than the merely _nominal_ lawyers of the

Temple at the present time. For several generations, and for two

centuries after Sir John Fortescue wrote the 'De Laudibus,' the

Inns-of-Court man was more busied in learning to sing than in learning

to argue a law cause, more desirous to fence with a sword than to fence

with logic.

"Notwithstanding," runs Mulcaster's translation of the 'De

Laudibus,'[23] "the same lawes are taught and learned, in a certaine

place of publique or common studie, more convenient and apt for

attayninge to the knowledge of them, than any other university. For

theyr place of studie is situate nigh to the Kinges Courts, where the

same lawes are pleaded and argued, and judgements by the same given by

judges, men of gravitie, auncient in yeares, perfit and graduate in the

same lawes. Wherefore, euerie day in court, the students in those lawes

resorte by great numbers into those courts wherein the same lawes are

read and taught, as it were in common schooles. This place of studie is

far betweene the place of the said courts and the cittie of London,

which of all thinges necessarie is the plentifullest of all cities and

townes of the realme. So that the said place of studie is not situate

within the cittie, where the confluence of people might disturb the

quietnes of the studentes, but somewhat severall in the suburbes of the

same cittie, and nigher to the saide courts, that the studentes may

dayelye at their pleasure have accesse and recourse thither without

weariness."

Setting forth the condition and pursuits of law-students in his day, Sir

John Fortesque continues; "For in these greater inns, there can no

student bee mayntayned for lesse expenses by the yeare than twentye

markes. And if hee have a servaunt to wait uppon him, as most of them

have, then so much the greater will his charges bee. Nowe, by reason of

this charge, the children onely of noblemenne doo studye the lawes in

those innes. For the poore and common sorte of the people are not able

to bear so great charges for the exhibytion of theyr chyldren. And

Marchaunt menne can seldome finde in theyr heartes to hynder theyr

merchaundise with so greate yearly expenses. And it thus falleth out

that there is scant anye man founde within the realme skilfull and

cunning in the lawes, except he be a gentleman borne, and come of noble

stocke. Wherefore they more than any other kinde of men have a speciall

regarde to their nobility, and to the preservation of their honor and

fame. And to speake upryghtlye, there is in these greater innes, yea,

and in the lesser too, beside the studie of the lawes, as it were an

university or schoole of all commendable qualities requisite for noble

men. There they learn to sing, and to exercise themselves in all kinde

of harmonye. There also they practice daunsing, and other noblemen's

pastimes, as they use to do, which are brought up in the king's house.

On the working dayes, the most of them apply themselves to the studye of

the lawe, and on the holye dayes to the studye of holye Scripture;[24]

and out of the tyme of divine service, to the reading of Chronicles. For

there indeede are vertues studied, and vices exiled. So that, for the

endowment of vertue, and abandoning of vice, Knights and Barrons, with

other states and noblemen of the realme, place their children in those

innes, though they desire not to have them learned in the lawes, nor to

lieue by the practice thereof, but onely uppon their father's allowance.

Scant at anye tyme is there heard among them any sedition, chyding, or

grudging, and yet the offenders are punished with none other payne, but

onely to bee amooved from the compayne of their fellowshippe. Which

punishment they doo more feare than other criminall offendours doo feare

imprisonment and yrons: For hee that is once expelled from anye of those

fellowshippes is never received to bee a felowe in any of the other

fellowshippes. And so by this means there is continuall peace; and their

demeanor is lyke the behaviour of such as are coupled together in

perfect amytie."

Any person familiar with the Inns of Court at the present time will see

how closely the law-colleges of Victoria's London resemble in many

important particulars the law-colleges of Fortescue's period. After the

fashion of four centuries since young men are still induced to enter

them for the sake of honorable companionship, good society, and social

prestige, rather than for the sake of legal education. After the remarks

already made with regard to musical lawyers in a previous section of

this work, it is needless to say that Inns of Court men are not

remarkable for their application to vocal harmony; but the younger

members are still remarkable for the zeal with which they endeavor to

master the accomplishments which distinguish men of fashion and tone. If

the nominal (sometimes they are called 'ornamental') barristers of the

fifteenth century liked to read the Holy Scriptures, the young lawyers

of the nineteenth century are no less disposed to read their Bibles

critically, and argue as to the merits of Bishop Colenso and his

opponents. Moreover, the discipline described by Fortescue is still

found sufficient to maintain order in the inns.

Writing more than a century after Fortescue, Sir John Ferne, in his

'Blazon of Gentrie, the Glory of Generosity, and the Lacy's Nobility,'

observes: "Nobleness of blood, joyned with virtue, compteth the person

as most meet to the enterprize of any public service; and for that cause

it was not for nought that our antient governors in this land, did with

a special foresight and wisdom provide, that none should be admitted

into the Houses of Court, being seminaries sending forth men apt to the

government of justice, except he were a gentleman of blood. And that

this may seem a truth, I myself have seen a kalendar of all those which

were together in the society of one of the same houses, about the last

year of King Henry the Fifth, with the armes of their House and family

marshalled by their names; and I assure you, the self same monument doth

both approve them all to be gentlemen of perfect descents and also the

number of them much less than now it is, being at that time in one house

scarcely three score."[25]

This passage from an author who delighted to magnify the advantages of

generous descent, has contributed to the very general and erroneous

impression that until comparatively recent times the members of the

English bar were necessarily drawn from the highest ranks of society;

and several excellent writers on the antiquities of the law have laid

aside their customary caution and strengthened Ferne's words with

inaccurate comment.

Thus Pearce says of the author of the 'Glory of Generositie'--"He was

one of the advocates for excluding from the Inns of Court all who were

not 'a gentleman by blood,' according to the ancient rule mentioned by

Fortescue, which seems to have been disregarded in Elizabeth's time."

Fortescue nowhere mentions any such rule, but attributes the

aristocratic character of the law-colleges to the high cost of

membership. Far from implying that men of mean extraction were excluded

by an express prohibition, his words justify the inference that no such

rule existed in his time.

Though Inns-of-Court men were for many generations gentlemen by birth

almost without a single exception, it yet remains to be proved that

plebeian birth at any period disqualified persons for admission to the

law-colleges. If such a restriction ever existed it had disappeared

before the close of the fifteenth century--a period not favorable to the

views of those who were most anxious to remove the barriers placed by

feudal society between the gentle and the vulgar. Sir John More (the

father of the famous Sir Thomas) was a Judge in the King's Bench,

although his parentage was obscure; and it is worthy of notice that he

was a successful lawyer of Fortescue's period. Lord Chancellor Audley

was not entitled to bear arms by birth, but was merely the son of a

prosperous yeoman. The lowliness of his extraction cannot have been any

serious impediment to him, for before the end of his thirty-sixth year

he was a sergeant. In the following century the inns received a steadily

increasing number of students, who either lacked generous lineage or

were the offspring of shameful love. For instance, Chief Justice Wray's

birth was scandalous; and if Lord Ellesmere in his youth reflected with

pride on the dignity of his father, Sir Richard Egerton, he had reason

to blush for his mother. Ferne's lament over the loss of heraldric

virtue and splendor, which the inns had sustained in his time, testifies

to the presence of a considerable plebeian element amongst the members

of the law-university. But that which was marked in the sixteenth was

far more apparent in the seventeenth century. Scroggs's enemies were

wrong in stigmatizing him as a butcher's son, for the odious chief

justice was born and bred a gentleman, and Jeffreys could boast a decent

extraction; but there is abundance of evidence that throughout the

reigns of the Stuarts the inns swarmed with low-born adventurers. The

career of Chief Justice Saunders, who, beginning as a "poor beggar boy,"

of unknown parentage, raised himself to the Chiefship of the King's

Bench, shows how low an origin a judge might have in the seventeenth

century. To mention the names of such men as Parker, King, Yorke, Ryder,

and the Scotts, without placing beside them the names of such men as

Henley, Harcourt, Bathurst, Talbot, Murray, and Erskine, would tend to

create an erroneous impression that in the eighteenth century the bar

ceased to comprise amongst its industrious members a large aristocratic

element.

The number of barristers, however, who in that period brought themselves

by talent and honorable perseverance into the foremost rank of the legal

profession in spite of humble birth, unquestionably shows that ambitious

men from the obscure middle classes were more frequently than in any

previous century found pushing their fortunes in Westminster Hall. Lord

Macclesfield was the son of an attorney whose parents were of lowly

origin, and whose worldly means were even lower than their ancestral

condition. Lord Chancellor King's father was a grocer and salter who

carried on a retail business at Exeter; and in his youth the Chancellor

himself had acted as his father's apprentice--standing behind the

counter and wearing the apron and sleeves of a grocer's servitor. Philip

Yorke was the son of a country attorney who could boast neither wealth

nor gentle descent. Chief Justice Ryder was the son of a mercer whose

shop stood in West Smithfield, and grandson of a dissenting minister,

who, though he bore the name, is not known to have inherited the blood

of the Yorkshire Ryders. Sir William Blackstone was the fourth son of a

silkman and citizen of London. Lords Stowell and Eldon were the children

of a provincial tradesman. The learned and good Sir Samuel Romilly's

father was Peter Romilly, jeweller, of Frith Street, Soho. Such were the

origins of some of the men who won the prizes of the law in

comparatively recent times. The present century has produced an even

greater number of barristers who have achieved eminence, and are able to

say with honest pride that they are the _first_ gentlemen mentioned in

their pedigrees; and so thoroughly has the bar become an open

profession, accessible to all persons[26] who have the means of

gentlemen, that no barrister at the present time would have the bad

taste or foolish hardihood to express openly his regret that the members

of a liberal profession should no longer pay a hurtful attention to

illiberal distinctions.

According to Fortescue, the law-students belonging at the same time to

the Inns of Court and Chancery numbered _at least_ one thousand eight

hundred in the fifteenth century; and it may be fairly inferred from his

words that their number considerably exceeded two thousand. To each of

the ten Inns of Chancery the author of the 'De Laudibus' assigns "an

hundred students at the least, and to some of them a much greater

number;" and he says that the least populous of the four Inns of Court

contained "two hundred students or thereabouts." At the present time the

number of barristers--together with Fellows of the College of Advocates,

and certificated special pleaders and conveyancers not at the bar--is

shown by the Law List for 1866 to be somewhat more than 4800.[27] Even

when it is borne in mind how much the legal business of the whole nation

has necessarily increased with the growth of our commercial

prosperity--it being at the same time remembered, upon the other hand,

how many times the population of the country has doubled itself since

the wars of the Roses--few persons will be of opinion that the legal

profession, either by the number of its practitioners or its command of

employment, is a more conspicuous and prosperous power at the present

time than it was in the fifteenth century.

Ferne was by no means the only gentleman of Elizabethan London to

deplore the rapid increase in the number of lawyers, and to regret the

growing liberality which encouraged--or rather the national prosperity

which enabled--men of inferior parentage to adopt the law as a

profession. In his address on Mr. Clerke's elevation to the dignity of a

sergeant, Lord Chancellor Hatton, echoing the common complaint

concerning the degradation of the law through the swarms of plebeian

students and practitioners, observed--"Let not the dignitie of the lawe

be geven to men unmeete. And I do exhorte you all that are heare present

not to call men to the barre or the benches that are so unmeete. I finde

that there are now more at the barre in one house than there was in all

the Innes of Court when I was a younge man." Notwithstanding the

Chancellor's earnest statement of his personal recollection of the state

of things when he was a young man, there is reason to think that he was

quite in error in thinking that lawyers had increased so greatly in

number. From a MS. in Lord Burleigh's collection, it appears that in

1586 the number of law-students, resident during term, was only 1703--a

smaller number than that which Fortescue computed the entire population

of the London law-students, at a time when civil war had cruelly

diminished the number of men likely to join an aristocratic university.

Sir Edward Coke estimated the roll of Elizabethan law-students at one

thousand, half their number in Fortescue's time. Coke, however, confined

his attention in this matter to the Students of Inns of Court, and paid

no attention to Inns of Chancery. Either Hatton greatly exaggerated the

increase of the legal working profession; or in previous times the

proportion of law-students who never became barristers greatly exceeded

those who were ultimately called to the bar.

Something more than a hundred years later, the old cry against the

low-born adventurers, who, to the injury of the public and the

degradation of the law, were said to overwhelm counsellors and

solicitors of superior tone and pedigree, was still frequently heard in

the coteries of disappointed candidates for employment in Westminster

Hall, and on the lips of men whose hopes of achieving social distinction

were likely to be frustrated so long as plebeian learning and energy

were permitted to have free action. In his 'History of Hertfordshire'

(published in 1700), Sir Henry Chauncey, Sergeant-at-Law, exclaims: "But

now these mechanicks, ambitious of rule and government, often educate

their sons in these seminaries of law, whereby they overstock the

profession, and so make it contemptible; whilst the gentry, not sensible

of the mischief they draw upon themselves, but also upon the nation,

prefer them in their business before their own children, whom they

bereave of their employment, formerly designed for their support;

qualifying their servants, by the profit of this profession, to purchase

their estates, and by this means make them their lords and masters,

whilst they lessen the trade of the kingdom, and cause a scarcity of

husbandmen, workmen, artificers, and servants in the nation."

That the Inns of Court became less and less aristocratic throughout the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there is no reason to doubt; but it

may be questioned whether it was so overstocked with competent working

members, as poor Sir Henry Chauncey imagined it. Describing the state of

the inns some two generations later, Blackstone computed the number of

law-students at about a thousand, perhaps slightly more; and he observes

that in his time the merely _nominal_ law-students were comparatively

few. "Wherefore," he says, "few gentlemen now resort to the Inns of

Court, but such for whom the knowledge of practice is absolutely

necessary; such, I mean, as are intended for the profession; the rest of

our gentry, (not to say our nobility also) having usually retired to

their estates, or visited foreign kingdoms, or entered upon public life,

without any instruction in the laws of the land, and indeed with hardly

any opportunity of gaining instruction, unless it can be afforded to

them in the universities."

The folly of those who lamented that men of plebeian rank were allowed

to adopt the legal profession as a means of livelihood, was however

exceeded by the folly of men of another sort, who endeavored to hide the

humble extractions of eminent lawyers, under the ingenious falsehoods of

fictitious pedigrees. In the last century, no sooner had a lawyer of

humble birth risen to distinction, than he was pestered by fabricators

of false genealogies, who implored him to accept their silly romances

about his ancestry. In most cases, these ridiculous applicants hoped to

receive money for their dishonest representations; but not seldom it

happened that they were actuated by a sincere desire to protect the

heraldic honor of the law from the aspersions of those who maintained

that a man might fight his way to the woolsack, although his father had

been a tender of swine. Sometimes these imaginative chroniclers, not

content with fabricating a genealogical chart for a _parvenu_ Lord

Chancellor, insisted that he should permit them to write their lives in

such a fashion, that their earlier experiences should seem to be in

harmony with their later fortunes. Lord Macclesfield (the son of a poor

and ill-descended country attorney), was traced by officious adulators

to Reginald Le Parker, who accompanied Edward I., while Prince of Wales,

to the Holy Land. In like manner a manufacturer of genealogies traced

Lord Eldon to Sir Michael Scott of Balwearie. When one of this servile

school of worshippers approached Lord Thurlow with an assurance that he

was of kin with Cromwell's secretary Thurloe, the Chancellor, with bluff

honesty, responded, "Sir, as Mr. Secretary Thurloe was, like myself, a

Suffolk man, you have an excuse for your mistake. In the seventeenth

century two Thurlows, who were in no way related to each other,

flourished in Suffolk. One was Cromwell's secretary Thurloe, the other

was Thurlow, the Suffolk carrier. I am descended from the carrier."

Notwithstanding Lord Thurlow's frequent and consistent disavowals of

pretension to any heraldic pedigree, his collateral descendants are

credited in the 'Peerages' with a descent from an ancient family.

[23] This charming book was written during the author's exile, which

began in 1463.

[24] This passage is one of several passages in Pre-reformation English

literature which certify that the Bible was much more widely and

carefully read by lettered and studious layman, in times prior to the

rupture between England and Rome, than many persons are aware, and some

violent writers like to acknowledge.

[25] Pathetically deploring the change wrought by time, Ferne also

observes of the Inns of Court,--"Pity to see the same places, through

the malignity of the times, and the negligence of those which should

have had care to the same, been altered quite from their first

institution."

[26] It is not unusual now-a-days to see on the screened list of

students about to be called to the bar the names of gentlemen who have

caused themselves to be described in the quasi-public lists as the sons

of tradesmen. Some few years since a gentleman who has already made his

name known amongst juniors, was thus 'screened'in the four halls as the

son of a petty tradesman in an obscure quarter of London; and assuming

that his conduct was due to self-respect and affectionate regard for his

parent, it seemed to most observers that the young lawyer, in thus

frankly stating his lowly origin, acted with spirit and dignity. It may

be that years hence this highly-accomplished gentleman will, like Lord

Tenterden and Lord St. Leonards (both of whom were the sons of honest

but humble tradesmen), see his name placed upon the roll of England's

hereditary noblesse.

[27] Of this number about 2500 reside in or near London and maintain

some apparent connexion with the Inns of Court. Of the remainder, some

reside in Scotland, some in Ireland, some in the English provinces, some

in the colonies; whilst some of them, although their names are still on

the Law List, have ceased to regard themselves as members of the legal

profession.

CHAPTER XXXV.

LAW-FRENCH AND LAW-LATIN.

No circumstances of the Norman Conquest more forcibly illustrate the

humiliation of the conquered people, than the measures by which the

invaders imposed their language on the public courts of the country, and

endeavored to make it permanently usurp the place of the mother-tongue

of the despised multitude; and no fact more signally displays our

conservative temper than the general reluctance of English society to

relinquish the use of the French words and phrases which still tincture

the language of parliament, and the procedures of Westminster Hall,

recalling to our minds the insolent domination of a few powerful

families who occupied our country by force, and ruled our forefathers

with vigorous injustice.

Frenchmen by birth, education, sympathy, William's barons did their

utmost to make England a new France: and for several generations the

descendants of the successful invaders were no less eager to abolish

every usage which could remind the vanquished race of their lost

supremacy. French became the language of parliament and the

council-chamber. It was spoken by the judges who dispensed justice in

the name of a French king, and by the lawyers who followed the royal

court in the train of the French-speaking judges. In the hunting-field

and the lists no gentleman entitled to bear coat-armour deigned to utter

a word of English: it was the same in Fives' Court and at the

gambling-table. Schoolmasters were ordered to teach their pupils to

construe from Latin into French, instead of into English; and young men

of Anglo-Saxon extraction, bent on rising in the world by native talent

and Norman patronage, labored to acquire the language of the ruling

class and forget the accents of their ancestors. The language and usages

of modern England abound with traces of the French of this period. To

every act that obtained the royal assent during last session of

parliament, the queen said "La reyne le veult." Every bill which is sent

up from the Commons to the Lords, an officer of the lower house endorses

with "Soit baile aux Seigneurs;" and no bill is ever sent down from the

Lords to the Commons until a corresponding officer of the upper house

has written on its back, "Soit baile aux Communes."

In like manner our parochial usages, local sports, and domestic games

continually remind us of the obstinate tenacity with which the

Anglo-Saxon race has preserved, and still preserves, the vestiges of its

ancient subjection to a foreign yoke. The crier of a country town, in

any of England's fertile provinces, never proclaims the loss of a

yeoman's sporting-dog, the auction of a bankrupt dealer's

stock-in-trade, or the impounding of a strayed cow, until he has

commanded, in Norman-French, the attention of the sleepy rustics. The

language of the stable and the kennel is rich in traces of Norman

influence; and in backgammon, as played by orthodox players, we have a

suggestive memorial of those Norman nobles, of whom Fortescue, in the

'De Laudibus' observes: "Neither had they delyght to hunt, and to

exercise other sportes and pastimes, as dyce-play and the hand-ball, but

in their own proper tongue."

In behalf of the Norman _noblesse_ it should be borne in mind that their

policy in this matter was less intentionally vexatious and insolent than

it has appeared to superficial observers. In the great majority of

causes the suitors were Frenchmen; and it was just as reasonable that

they should like to understand the arguments of their counsel and

judges, as it is reasonable for suitors in the present day to require

the proceedings in Westminster Hall to be clothed in the language most

familiar to the majority of persons seeking justice in its courts. If

the use of French pleadings was hard on the one Anglo-Saxon suitor who

demanded justice in Henry I.'s time, the use of English pleadings would

have been equally annoying to the nine French gentlemen who appeared for

the same purpose in the king's court. It was greatly to be desired that

the two races should have one common language; and common sense ordained

that the tongue of the one or the other race should be adopted as the

national language. Which side therefore was to be at the pains to learn

a new tongue? Should the conquerors labor to acquire Anglo-Saxon? or

should the conquered be required to learn French? In these days the

cultivated Englishmen who hold India by military force, even as the

Norman invaders held England, by the right of might, settle a similar

question by taking upon themselves the trouble of learning as much of

the Asiatic dialects as is necessary for purposes of business. But the

Norman barons were not cultivated; and for many generations ignorance

was with them an affair of pride no less than of constitutional

inclination.

Soon ambitious Englishmen acquired the new language, in order to use it

as an instrument for personal advancement. The Saxon stripling who could

keep accounts in Norman fashion, and speak French as fluently as his

mother tongue, might hope to sell his knowledge in a good market. As the

steward of a Norman baron he might negotiate between my lord and my

lord's tenants, letting my lord know as much of his tenant's wishes, and

revealing to the tenants as much of their lord's intentions as suited

his purpose. Uniting in his own person the powers of interpreter,

arbitrator, and steward, he possessed enviable opportunities and

facilities for acquiring wealth. Not seldom, when he had grown rich, or

whilst his fortunes were in the ascendant, he assumed a French name as

well as a French accent; and having persuaded himself and his younger

neighbors that he was a Frenchman, he in some cases bequeathed to his

children an ample estate and a Norman pedigree. In certain causes in the

law courts the agent (by whatever title known) who was a perfect master

of the three languages (French, Latin, and English) had greatly the

advantage over an opposing agent who could speak only French and Latin.

From the Conquest till the latter half of the fourteenth century the

pleadings in courts of justice were in Norman-French; but in the 36 Ed.

III., it was ordained by the king "that all plees, which be to be pleded

in any of his courts, before any of his justices; or in his other

places; or before any of his other ministers; or in the courts and

places of any other lords within the realm, shall be pleded, shewed, and

defended, answered, debated, and judged in the English tongue, and that

they be entred and enrolled in Latine. And that the laws and customs of

the same realm, termes, and processes, be holden and kept as they be,

and have been before this time; and that by the antient termes and forms

of the declarations no man be prejudiced; so that the matter of the

action be fully shewed in the demonstration and in the writ." Long

before this wise measure of reform was obtained by the urgent wishes of

the nation, the French of the law courts had become so corrupt and

unlike the language of the invaders, that it was scarcely more

intelligible to educated natives of France than to most Englishmen of

the highest rank. A jargon compounded of French and Latin, none save

professional lawyers could translate it with readiness or accuracy; and

whilst it unquestionably kept suitors in ignorance of their own affairs,

there is reason to believe that it often perplexed the most skilful of

those official interpreters who were never weary of extolling his

lucidity and precision.

But though English lawyers were thus expressly forbidden in 1362 to

plead in Law-French, they persisted in using the hybrid jargon for

reports and treatises so late as George II.'s reign; and for an equal

length of time they seized every occasion to introduce scraps of

Law-French into their speeches at the bars of the different courts. It

should be observed that these antiquarian advocates were enabled thus to

display their useless erudition by the provisions of King Edward's act,

which, while it forbade French _pleadings_, specially ordained the

retention of French terms.

Roger North's essay 'On the study of the Laws' contains amusing

testimony to the affection with which the lawyers of his day regarded

their Law-French, and also shows how largely it was used till the close

of the seventeenth century by the orators of Westminster Hall. "Here I

must stay to observe," says the author, enthusiastically, "the

necessity of a student's early application to learn the old Law-French,

for these books, and most others of considerable authority, are

delivered in it. Some may think that because the Law-French is no better

than the old Norman corrupted, and now a deformed hotch-potch of the

English and Latin mixed together, it is not fit for a polite spark to

foul himself with; but this nicety is so desperate a mistake, that

lawyer and Law-French are coincident; one will not stand without the

other." So enamored was he of the grace and excellence of law-reporters'

French, that he regarded it as a delightful study for a man of fashion,

and maintained that no barrister would do justice to the law and the

interests of his clients who did not season his sentences with Norman

verbiage. "The law," he held, "is scarcely expressible properly in

English, and when it is done, it must be _Francoise_, or very uncouth."

Edward III.'s measure prohibitory of French pleadings had therefore

comparatively little influence on the educational course of

law-students. The published reports of trials, known by the name of

Year-Books, were composed in French, until the series terminated in the

time of Henry VIII.; and so late as George II.'s reign, Chief Baron

Comyn preferred such words as 'chemin,' 'dismes,' and 'baron and feme,'

to such words as 'highway,' 'tithes,' 'husband and wife.' More liberal

than the majority of his legal brethren, even as his enlightenment with

regard to public affairs exceeded that of ordinary politicians of his

time, Sir Edward Coke wrote his commentaries in English, but when he

published them, he felt it right to soothe the alarm of lawyers by

assuring them that his departure from ancient usage could have no

disastrous consequences. "I cannot conjecture," he apologetically

observes in his preface, "that the general communicating these laws in

the English tongue can work any inconvenience."

Some of the primary text-books of legal lore had been rendered into

English, and some most valuable treatises had been written and published

in the mother tongue of the country; but in the seventeenth century no

Inns-of-Court man could acquire an adequate acquaintance with the usages

and rules of our courts and the decisions of past judges, until he was

able to study the Year-Books and read Littleton in the original. To

acquire this singular language--a _dead_ tongue that cannot be said to

have ever lived--was the first object of the law-student. He worked at

it in his chamber, and with faltering and uncertain accents essayed to

speak it at the periodic mootings in which he was required to take part

before he could be called to the bar, and also after he had become an

utter-barrister. In his 'Autobiography,' Sir Simonds D'Ewes makes

mention in several places of his Law-French exercises (_temp._ James

I.), and in one place of his personal story he observes, "I had twice

mooted in Law-French before I was called to the bar, and several times

after I was made an utter-barrister, in our open hall. Thrice also

before I was of the bar, I argued the reader's cases at the Inns of

Chancery publicly, and six times afterwards. And then also, being an

utter-barrister, I had twice argued our Middle-Temple reader's case at

the cupboard, and sat nine times in our hall at the bench, and argued

such cases in English as had before been argued by young gentlemen or

utter-barristers in Law-French bareheaded."

Amongst the excellent changes by which the more enlightened of the

Commonwealth lawyers sought to lessen the public clamor of law-reform

was the resolution that all legal records should be kept, and all writs

composed, in the language of the country. Hitherto the law records had

been kept in a Latin that was quite as barbarous as the French used by

the reporters; and the determination to abolish a custom which served

only to obscure the operations of justice and to confound the illiterate

was hailed by the more intelligent purchasers of law as a notable step

in the right direction. But the reform was by no means acceptable to the

majority of the bar, who did not hesitate to stigmatize the measure as a

dangerous innovation--which would prove injurious to learned lawyers and

peace-loving citizens, although it might possibly serve the purposes of

ignorant counsel and litigious 'lay gents.'[28]The legal literature of

three generations following Charles I.'s execution abounds with

contemptuous allusions to the 'English times' of Cromwell; the

old-fashioned reporters, hugging their Norman-French and looking with

suspicion on popular intelligence, were vehement in expressing their

contempt for the prevalent misuse of the mother tongue. "I have,"

observes Styles, in the preface to his reports, "made these reports

speak English; not that I believe that they will be thereby more

generally useful, for I have always been and yet am of opinion, that

that part of the Common Law which is in the English hath only occasioned

the making of unquiet spirits contentiously knowing, and more apt to

offend others than to defend themselves; but I have done it in obedience

to authority, and to stop the mouths of such of this English age, who,

though they be confessedly different in their minds and judgments, as

the builders of Babel were in their language, yet do think it vain, if

not impious, to speak or understand more than their own mother tongue."

In like manner, Whitelock's uncle Bulstrode, the celebrated reporter,

says of the second part of his reports, "that he had manny years since

perfected the words in French, in which language he had desired it

might have seen the light, being most proper for it, and most convenient

for the professors of the law."

The restorers who raised Charles II. to his father's throne, lost no

time in recalling Latin to the records and writs; and so gladly did the

reporters and the practising counsel avail themselves of the reaction in

favor of discarded usages, that more Law-French was written and talked

in Westminster Hall during the time of the restored king, than had been

penned and spoken throughout the first fifty years of the seventeenth

century.

The vexatious and indescribably absurd use of Law-Latin in records,

writs, and written pleadings, was finally put an end to by statute 4

George II. c. 26; but this bill, which discarded for legal processes a

cumbrous and harsh language, that was alike unmusical and inexact, and

would have been utterly unintelligible to a Roman gentleman of the

Augustan period, did not become law without much opposition from some of

the authorities of Westminster Hall. Lord Raymond, Chief Justice of the

King's Bench, spoke in accordance with opinions that had many supporters

on the bench and at the bar, when he expressed his warm disapprobation

of the proposed measure, and sarcastically observed "that if the bill

paused, the law might likewise be translated into Welsh, since many in

Wales understood not English." In the same spirit Sir Willian Blackstone

and more recent authorities have lamented the loss of Law-Latin. Lord

Campbell, in the 'Chancellors,' records that he "heard the late Lord

Ellenborough from the bench regret the change, on the ground that it had

had the tendency to make attorneys illiterate."

The sneer by which Lord Raymond endeavored to cast discredit on the

proposal to abolish Law-Latin, was recalled after the lapse of many

years by Sergeant Heywood, who forthwith acted upon it as though it

originated in serious thought. Whilst acting as Chief Justice of the

Carmarthen Circuit, the sergeant was presiding over a trial of murder,

when it was discovered that neither the prisoner, nor any member of the

jury, could understand a word of English; under these circumstances it

was suggested that the evidence and the charge should be explained

_verbatim_, to the prisoner and his twelve triers by an interpreter. To

this reasonable petition that the testimony should be presented in a

Welsh dress, the judge replied that, "to accede to the request would be

to repeal the act of parliament, which required that all proceedings in

courts of justice should be in the English tongue, and that the case of

a trial in Wales, in which the prisoner and jury should not understand

English, was a case not provided for, although the attention of the

legislature had been called to it by that great judge Lord Raymond." The

judge having thus decided, the inquiry proceeded--without the help of an

interpreter--the counsel for the prosecution favoring the jury with an

eloquent harangue, no single sentence of which was intelligible to them;

a series of witnesses proving to English auditors, beyond reach of

doubt, that the prisoner had deliberately murdered his wife; and finally

the judge instructing the jury, in language which was as insignificant

to their minds as the same quantity of obsolete Law-French would have

been, that it was their duty to return a verdict of 'Guilty.' Throwing

themselves into the humor of the business, the Welsh jurymen, although

they were quite familiar with the facts of the case, acquitted the

murderer, much to the encouragement of many wretched Welsh husbands

anxious for a termination of their matrimonial sufferings.

[28] In the seventeenth century, lawyers usually called their clients

and the non-legal public 'Lay Gents.'

CHAPTER XXXVI.

STUDENT LIFE IN OLD TIME.

From statements made in previous chapters, it may be seen that in

ancient times the Law University was a far more conspicuous feature of

the metropolis than it has been in more modern generations. In the

fifteenth century the law students of the town numbered about two

thousand; in Elizabethan London their number fluctuated between one

thousand and two thousand; towards the close of Charles II.'s reign they

were probably much less than fifteen hundred; in the middle of the

eighteenth century they do not seem to have much exceeded one thousand.

Thus at a time when the entire population of the capital was

considerably less than the population of a third-rate provincial town of

modern England, the Inns of Court and Chancery contained more

undergraduates than would be found on the books of the Oxford Colleges

at the present time.

Henry VIII.'s London looked to the University for mirth, news, trade.

During vacations there was but little stir in the taverns and shops of

Fleet Street; haberdashers and vintners sate idle; musicians starved;

and the streets of the capital were comparatively empty when the

students had withdrawn to spend their holidays in the country. As soon

as the gentlemen of the robe returned to town all was brisk and merry

again. As the town grew in extent and population, the social influence

of the university gradually decreased; but in Elizabethan London the

_eclat_ of the inns was at its brightest, and during the reigns of

Elizabeth's two nearest successors London submitted to the Inns-of-Court

men as arbiters of all matters pertaining to taste--copying their dress,

slang, amusements, and vices. The same may be said, with less emphasis,

of Charles II.'s London. Under the 'Merry Monarch' theatrical managers

were especially anxious to please the inns, for they knew that no play

would succeed which the lawyers had resolved to damn--that no actor

could achieve popularity if the gallants of the Temple combined to laugh

him down--that no company of performers could retain public favor when

they had lost the countenance of law-colleges. Something of this power

the young lawyers retained beyond the middle of the last century.

Fielding and Addison caught with nervous eagerness the critical gossip

of the Temple and Chancery Lane, just as Congreve and Wycherly, Dryden

and Cowley had caught it in previous generations. Fashionable tradesmen

and caterers for the amusement of the public made their engagements and

speculations with reference to the opening of term. New plays, new

books, new toys were never offered for the first time to London

purchasers when the lawyers were away. All that the 'season' is to

modern London, the 'term' was to old London, from the accession of Henry

VIII. to the death of George II., and many of the existing commercial

and fashionable arrangements of a London 'season' maybe traced to the

old-world 'term.'

In olden time the influence of the law-colleges was as great upon

politics as upon fashion. Sheltering members of every powerful family in

the country they were centres of political agitation, and places for the

secret discussion of public affairs. Whatever plot was in course of

incubation, the inns invariably harbored persons who were cognisant of

the conspiracy. When faction decided on open rebellion or hidden

treason, the agents of the malcontent leaders gathered together in the

inns, where, so long as they did not rouse the suspicions of the

authorities and maintained the bearing of studious men, they could hire

assassins, plan risings, hold interviews with fellow-conspirators, and

nurse their nefarious projects into achievement. At periods of danger

therefore spies were set to watch the gates of the hostels, and mark who

entered them. Governments took great pains to ascertain the secret life

of the collegians. A succession of royal directions for the discipline

of the inns under the Tudors and Stuarts points to the jealousy and

constant apprehensions with which the sovereigns of England long

regarded those convenient lurking-places for restless spirits and

dangerous adversaries. Just as the Student-quarter of Paris is still

watched by a vigilant police, so the Inns of Court were closely watched

by the agents of Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, of Burleigh and Buckingham.

During the troubles and contentions of Elizabeth's reign Lord Burleigh

was regularly informed concerning the life of the inns, the number of

students in and out of town, the parentage and demeanor of new members,

the gossip of the halls, and the rumors of the cloisters. In proportion

as the political temper and action of the lawyers were deemed matters of

high importance, their political indiscretions and misdemeanors were

promptly and sometimes ferociously punished. An idle joke over a pot of

wine sometimes cost a witty barrister his social rank and his ears. To

promote a wholesome fear of authority in the colleges, government every

now and then flogged a student at the cart's tail in Holborn, or

pilloried a sad apprentice of the law in Chancery Lane, or hung an

ancient on a gibbet at the entrance of his inn.

The anecdote-books abound with good stories that illustrate the

political excitability of the inns in past times, and the energy with

which ministers were wont to repress the first manifestations of

insubordination. Rushworth records the adventure of four young men of

Lincoln's Inn who throw aside prudence and sobriety in a tavern hard by

their inn, and drank to "the confusion of the Archbishop of Canterbury."

The next day, full of penitence and head-ache, the offenders were

brought before the council, and called to account for their scandalous

conduct; when they would have fared ill had not the Earl of Dorset done

them good service, and privately instructed them to say in their

defence, that they had not drunk confusion to the archbishop but to the

archbishop's _foes_. On this ingenious representation, the council

supposed that the drawer--on whose information the proceedings were

taken--had failed to catch the last word of the toast; and consequently

the young gentlemen were dismissed with a 'light admonition,' much to

their own surprise and the informer's chagrin.

Of the political explosiveness of the inns in Charles II.'s time

Narcissus Luttrell gives the following illustration in his diary, under

date June 15 and 16, 1681:--"The 15th was a project sett on foot in

Grayes Inn for the carrying on an addresse for thankes to his majestie

for his late declaration; and was moved that day in the hall by some at

dinner, and being (as is usual) sent to the barre messe to be by them

recommended to the bench, but was rejected both by bench and barr; but

the other side seeing they could doe no good this way, they gott about

forty together and went to the tavern, and there subscribed the said

addresse in the name of the truelye loyall gentlemen of Grayes Inn. The

chief sticklers for the said addition were Sir William Seroggs, Jun.,

Robert Fairebeard, Capt. Stowe, Capt. Radcliffe, one Yalden, with

others, to the number of 40 or thereabouts; many of them sharpers about

town, with clerks not out of their time, and young men newly come from

the university. And some of them went the 17th to Windsor, and presented

the said addresse to his majesty: who was pleasd to give them his

thanks and confer (it is said) knighthood on the said Mr. Fairebeard;

this proves a mistake since. The 16th was much such another addresse

carried on in the Middle Temple, where several Templars, meeting about

one or two that afternoon in the hall for that purpose, they began to

debate it, but they were opposed till the hall began to fill; and then

the addressers called for Mr. Montague to take the chaire; on which a

poll was demanded, but the addressers refused it, and carried Mr.

Montague and sett him in the chaire, and the other part pulled him out,

on which high words grew, and some blows were given; but the addressers

seeing they could doe no good with it in the hall, adjourned to the

Divill Tavern, and there signed the addresse; the other party kept in

the hall, and fell to protesting against such illegall and arbitrary

proceedings, subscribing their names to a greater number than the

addressers were, and presented the same to the bench as a grievance."

Like the King's Head Tavern, which stood in Chancery Lane, the Devil

Tavern, in Fleet Street, was a favorite house with the Caroline Lawyers.

Its proximity to the Temple secured the special patronage of the

templars, whereas the King's Head was more frequented by Lincoln's-Inn

men; and in the tavern-haunting days of the seventeenth century those

two places of entertainment saw many a wild and dissolute scene. Unlike

Chattelin, who endeavored to satisfy his guests with delicate repasts

and light wines, the hosts of the Devil and the King's Head provided the

more substantial fare of old England, and laid themselves out to please

roysterers who liked pots of ale in the morning, and were wont to drink

brandy by the pint as the clocks struck midnight. Nando's, the house

where Thurlow in his student-period used to hold nightly disputations

with all comers of suitable social rank, was an orderly place in

comparison with these more venerable hostelries; and though the Mitre,

Cock, and Rainbow have witnessed a good deal of deep drinking, it may be

questioned if they, or any other ancient taverns of the legal quarter,

encouraged a more boisterous and reckless revelry than that which

constituted the ordinary course of business at the King's Head and the

Devil.

In his notes for Jan. 1681-2, Mr. Narcissus Luttrell observes--"The

13th, at night, some young gentlemen of the Temple went to the King's

Head Tavern, Chancery Lane, committing strange outrages there, breaking

windowes, &c., which the watch hearing of came to disperse them; but

they sending for severall of the watermen with halberts that attend

their comptroller of the revells, were engaged in a desperate riott, in

which one of the watchmen was run into the body and lies very ill; but

the watchmen secured one or two of the watermen." Eleven years later the

diarist records: "Jan. 5. One Batsill, a young gentleman of the Temple,

was committed to Newgate for wounding a captain at the Devil Tavern in

Fleet Street on Saturday last." Such ebullitions of manly

spirit--ebullitions pleasant enough to the humorist, but occasionally

productive of very disagreeable and embarrassing consequences--were not

uncommon in the neighborhood of the Inns of Court whilst the Christmas

revels were in progress.

A tempestuous, hot-blooded, irascible set were these gentlemen of the

law-colleges, more zealous for their own honor than careful for the

feelings of their neighbors. Alternately warring with sharp tongues,

sharp pens, and sharp swords they went on losing their tempers, friends,

and lives in the most gallant and picturesque manner imaginable. Here is

a nice little row which occurred in the Middle Temple Hall during the

days of good Queen Bess! "The records of the society," says Mr. Foss,

"preserve an account of the expulsion of a member, which is rendered

peculiarly interesting in consequence of the eminence to which the

delinquent afterwards attained as a statesman, a poet, and a lawyer.

Whilst the masters of the bench and other members of the society were

sitting quietly at dinner on February 9, 1597-8, John Davis came into

the hall with his hat on his head, and attended by two persons armed

with swords, and going up to the barrister's table, where Richard Martin

was sitting, he pulled out from under his gown a cudgel 'quem vulgariter

vocant a bastinado,' and struck him over the head repeatedly, and with

so much violence that the bastinado was shivered into many pieces. Then

retiring to the bottom of the hall, he drew one of his attendants'

swords and flourished it over his head, turning his face towards Martin,

and then turning away down the water steps of the Temple, threw himself

into a boat. For this outrageous act he was immediately disbarred and

expelled the house, and deprived for ever of all authority to speak or

consult in law. After nearly four years' retirement he petitioned the

benchers for his restoration, which they accorded on October 30, 1601,

upon his making a public submission in the hall, and asking pardon of

Mr. Martin, who at once generously forgave him." Both the principals in

this scandalous outbreak and subsequent reconciliation became honorably

known in their profession--Martin rising to be a Recorder of London and

a member of parliament; and Davies acting as Attorney General of Ireland

and Speaker of the Irish parliament, and achieving such a status in

politics and law that he was appointed to the Chief Justiceship of

England, an office, however, which sudden death prevented him from

filling.

Nor must it be imagined that gay manners and lax morals were less

general amongst the veterans than amongst the youngsters of the bar.

Judges and sergeants were quite as prone to levity and godless riot as

students about to be called; and such was the freedom permitted by

professional decorum that leading advocates habitually met their clients

in taverns, and having talked themselves dry at the bars of Westminster

Hall, drank themselves speechless at the bars of Strand taverns--ere

they reeled again into their chambers. The same habits of uproarious

self-indulgence were in vogue with the benchers of the inns, and the

Doctors of Doctors' Commons. Hale's austerity was the exceptional

demeanor of a pious man protesting against the wickedness of an impious

age. Had it not been for the shortness of time that had elapsed since

Algernon Sidney's trial and sentence, John Evelyn would have seen no

reason for censuring the loud hilarity and drunkenness of Jeffreys and

Withings at Mrs. Castle's wedding.

In some respects, however, the social atmosphere of the inns was far

more wholesome in the days of Elizabeth, and for the hundred years

following her reign, than it is at present. Sprung in most cases from

legal families, the students who were educated to be working members of

the bar lived much more under the observation of their older relations,

and in closer intercourse with their mothers and sisters than they do at

present. Now-a-days young Templars, fresh from the universities, would

be uneasy and irritable under strict domestic control; and as men with

beards and five-and-twenty years' knowledge of the world, they would

resent any attempt to draw them within the lines of domestic control.

But in Elizabethan and also in Stuart London, law-students were

considerably younger than they are under Victoria.

Moreover, the usage of the period trained young men to submit with

cheerfulness to a parental discipline that would be deemed intolerable

by our own youngsters. During the first terms of their eight, seven, or

at least six years of pupilage, until they could secure quarters within

college walls, students frequently lodged in the houses or chambers of

near relations who were established in the immediate vicinity of the

inns. A judge with a house in Fleet Street, an eminent counsel with a

family mansion in Holborn, or an office-holder with commodious chambers

in Chancery Lane, usually numbered amongst the members of his family a

son, or nephew, or cousin who was keeping terms for the bar. Thus placed

under the immediate superintendence of an elder whom he regarded with

affection and pride, and surrounded by the wholesome interests of a

refined domestic circle, the raw student was preserved from much folly

and ill-doing into which he would have fallen had he been thrown

entirely on his own resources for amusement.

The pecuniary means of Inns-of-Court students have not varied much

throughout the last twelve generations. In days when money was scarce

and very precious they of course lived on a smaller number of coins than

they require in these days when gold and silver are comparatively

abundant and cheap; but it is reasonable to suppose that in every period

the allowances, on which the less affluent of them subsisted, represent

the amounts on which young men of their respective times were just able

to maintain the figure and style of independent gentlemen. The costly

pageants and feasts of the inns in old days must not be taken as

indicative of the pecuniary resources of the common run of students; for

the splendor of those entertainments was mainly due to the munificence

of those more wealthy members who by a liberal and even profuse

expenditure purchased a right to control the diversions of the colleges.

Fortescue, speaking of his own time, says: "There can no student bee

mayntayned for lesse expenses by the yeare than twentye markes. And if

hee haue a seruant to waite uppon him, as most of them haue, then so

much the greater will his charges bee." Hence it appears that during the

most patrician period of the law university, when wealthy persons were

accustomed to maintain ostentatious retinues of servants, a law-student

often had no private personal attendant. An ordinance shows that in

Elizabethan London the Inns-of-Court men were waited upon by laundresses

or bedmakers who served and took wages from several masters at the same

time. It would be interesting to ascertain the exact time when the

"laundress" was first introduced into the Temple. She certainly

flourished in the days of Queen Bess; and Roger North's piquant

description of his brother's laundress is applicable to many of her

successors who are looking after their perquisites at the present date.

"The housekeeper," says Roger, "had been formerly his lordship's

laundress at the Temple, and knew well her master's brother so early as

when he was at the writing-school. She _was a phthisical old woman, and

could scarce crawl upstairs once a day_." This general employment of

servants who were common to several masters would alone prove that the

Inns-of-Court men in the seventeenth century felt it convenient to

husband their resources, and exercise economy. Throughout that century

sixty pounds was deemed a sufficient income for a Temple student; and

though it was a scant allowance, some young fellows managed to push on

with a still more modest revenue. Simonds D'Ewes had L60 per annum

during his student course, and L100 a year on becoming an

utter-barrister. "It pleased God also in mercy," he writes, "after this

to ease me of that continual want or short stipend I had for about five

years last past groaned under; for my father, immediately on my call to

the bar, enlarged my former allowance with forty pounds more annually;

so as, after this plentiful annuity of one hundred pounds was duly and

quarterly paid me by him, I found myself easyd of so many cares and

discontents as I may well account that the 27th day of June foregoing

the first day of my outward happiness since the decease of my dearest

mother." All things considered, a bachelor in James I.'s London with a

clear income of L100 per annum was on the whole as well off for his time

as a young barrister of the present day would be with an annual

allowance of L250 or L300. Francis North, when a student, was allowed

only L60 per annum; and as soon as he was called and began to earn a

little money, his parsimonious father reduced the stipend by L10; but,

adds Roger North, "to do right to his good father, he paid him that

fifty pounds a year as long as he lived, saying he would not discourage

industry by rewarding it, when successful, with less." George Jeffreys,

in his student-days, smarted under a still more galling penury, for he

was allowed only L50 a year, L10 being for his clothes, and L40 for the

rest of his expenditure. In the following century the nominal incomes of

law-students rose in proportion as the wealth of the country increased

and the currency fell in value. In George II.'s time a young Templar

expected his father to allow him L150 a year, and on encouragement would

spend twice that amount in the same time. Henry Fielding's allowance

from General Fielding was L200 per annum; but as he said, with a laugh,

he had too feeling and dutiful a nature to press an affectionate father

for money which he was totally unable to pay. At the present time L150

per annum is about the smallest sum on which a law-student can live with

outward decency; and L250 per annum the lowest amount on which a chamber

barrister can live with suitable dignity and comfort. If he has to

maintain the expenses of a distant circuit Mr. Briefless requires from

L100 to L200 more. Alas! how many of Mr. Briefless's meritorious and

most ornamental kind are compelled to shift on far less ample means!

How many of them periodically repeat the jest of poor A----, who made

this brief and suggestive official return to the Income Tax

Commissioners--"I am totally dependent on my father, who allows

me--nothing!"

CHAPTER XXXVII.

READERS AND MOOTMEN.

Romantic eulogists of the Inns of Court maintain that, as an instrument

of education, the law-university was nearly perfect for many generations

after its consolidation. That in modern time abuses have impaired its

faculties and diminished its usefulness they admit. Some of them are

candid enough to allow that, as a school for the systematic study of

law, it is under existing circumstances a deplorably deficient machine;

but they unite in declaring that there _was_ a time when the system of

the combined Colleges was complete and thoroughly efficacious. The more

cautious of these eulogists decline to state the exact limits of the

period when the actual condition of the university merited their cordial

approval, but they concur in pointing to the years between the accession

of Henry VII. and the death of James I., as comprising the brightest

days of its academical vigor and renown.

It is however worthy of observation that throughout the times when the

legal learning and discipline of the colleges are described to have been

admirable, the system and the students by no means won the approbation

of those critical authorities who were best able to see their failings

and merits. Wolsey was so strongly impressed by the faulty education of

the barristers who practised before him, and more especially by their

total ignorance of the principles of jurisprudence, that he prepared a

plan for a new university which should be established in London, and

should impart a liberal and exact knowledge of law. Had he lived to

carry out his scheme it is most probable that the Inns of Court and

Chancery would have become subsidiary and subordinate establishments to

the new foundation. In this matter, sympathizing with the more

enlightened minds of his age, Sir Nicholas Bacon was no less desirous

than the great cardinal that a new law university should be planted in

town, and he urged on Henry VIII. the propriety of devoting a certain

portion of the confiscated church property to the foundation and

endowment of such an institution.

On paper the scheme of the old exercises and degrees looks very

imposing, and those who delight in painting fancy pictures may infer

from them that the scholastic order of the colleges was perfect. Before

a young man could be called to the bar, he had under ordinary

circumstances to spend seven or eight years in arguing cases at the Inns

of Chancery, in proving his knowledge of law and Law-French at moots, in

sharpening his wits at case-putting, in patient study of the Year-Books,

and in watching the trials of Westminster Hall. After his call he was

required to spend another period in study and academic exercise before

he presumed to raise his voice at the bar; and in his progress to the

highest rank of his profession he was expected to labor in educating the

students of his house as assistant-reader, single-reader, double-reader.

The gravest lawyers of every inn were bound to aid in the task of

teaching the mysteries of the law to the rising generation.

The old ordinances assumed that the law-student was thirsting for a

knowledge of law, and that the veterans were no less eager to impart

it. During term law was talked in hall at dinner and supper, and after

these meals the collegians argued points. "The cases were put" after the

earlier repast, and twice or thrice a week moots were "brought in" after

the later meal. The students were also encouraged to assemble towards

the close of each day and practise 'case-putting' in their gardens and

in the cloisters of the Temple or Lincoln's Inn. The 'great fire' of

1678-9 having destroyed the Temple Cloisters, some of the benchers

proposed to erect chambers on the ground, to and fro upon which

law-students had for generations walked whilst they wrangled aloud; but

the Earl of Nottingham, recalling the days when young Heneage Finch used

to put cases with his contemporary students, strangled the proposal at

its birth, and Sir Christopher Wren subsequently built the Cloisters

which may be seen at the present day.

But there is reason to fear that at a very early period in their history

the Inns of Court began to pay more attention to certain outward forms

of instruction than to instruction itself. The unbiassed inquirer is

driven to suspect that 'case-putting' soon became an idle ceremony, and

'mooting' a mere pastime. Gentlemen ate heartily in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries; and it is not easy to believe that immediately

after a twelve o'clock dinner benchers were in the best possible mood to

teach, or students in the fittest condition for learning. It is credible

that these post-prandial exercitations were often enlivened by sparkling

quips and droll occurrences; but it is less easy to believe that they

were characterised by severe thought and logical exactness. So also with

the after-supper exercises. The six o'clock suppers of the lawyers were

no light repasts, but hearty meals of meat and bread, washed down by

'_green pots_' of ale and wine. When 'the horn' sounded for supper, the

student was in most cases better able to see the truth of knotty points

than when in compliance with etiquette he bowed to the benchers, and

asked if it was their pleasure to hear a moot. It seems probable that

long before 'case-puttings' and 'mootings' were altogether disused, the

old benchers were wont to wink mischievously at each other when they

prepared to teach the boys, and that sometimes they would turn away from

the proceedings of a moot with an air of disdain or indifference. The

inquirer is not induced to rate more highly the intellectual effort of

such exercises because the teachers refreshed their exhausted powers

with bread and beer as soon as the arguments were closed.

When such men as Coke and Francis Bacon were the readers, the students

were entertained with lectures of surpassing excellence; but it was

seldom that such readers could be found. It seems also that at an early

period men became readers, not because they had any especial aptitude

for offices of instruction, or because they had some especial fund of

information--but simply because it was their turn to read. Routine

placed them in the pulpit for a certain number of weeks; and when they

had done all that routine required of them, and had thereby qualified

themselves for promotion to the rank of sergeant, they took their seats

amongst the benchers and ancients with the resolution not to trouble

themselves again about the intellectual progress of the boys.

Soon also the chief teacher of an Inn of Court became its chief feaster

and principal entertainer; and in like manner his subordinates in

office, such as assistant readers and readers elect, were required to

put their hands into their pockets, and feed their pupils with venison

and wine as well as with law and equity. It is amusing to observe how

little Dugdale has to say about the professional duties of readers--and

how much about their hospitable functions and responsibilities. Philip

and Mary ordered that no reader of the Middle Temple should give away

more than fifteen bucks during his readings; but so greatly did the cost

of readers' entertainments increase in the following century, that

Dugdale observes--"But the times are altered; there being few summer

readers who, in half the time that heretofore a reading was wont to

continue, spent so little as threescore bucks, besides red deer; some

have spent fourscore, some an hundred."

Just as readers were required to spend more in hospitality, they were

required to display less learning. Sound lawyers avoided election to the

readers' chairs, leaving them to be filled by rich men who could afford

to feast the nobility and gentry, or at least by men who were willing to

purchase social _eclat_ with a lavish outlay of money. Under Charles II.

the 'readings' were too often nothing better than scandalous exhibitions

of mental incapacity: and having sunk into disrepute, they died out

before the accession of James II.

The scandalous and beastly disorder of the Grand Day Feasts at the

Middle Temple, during Francis North's tenure of the reader's office, was

one of the causes that led to the discontinuance of Reader's Banquets at

that house; and the other inns gladly followed the example of the Middle

Temple in putting an end to a custom which had ceased to promote the

dignity of the law. Of this feast, and his brother's part in it, Roger

North says: "He (_i.e._ Francis North) sent out the officers with white

staves (for so the way was) and a long list to invite; but he went

himself to wait upon the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sheldon; for so also

the ceremony required. The archbishop received him very honorably and

would not part with him at the stairshead, as usually had been done;

but, telling him he was no ordinary reader, went down, and did not part

till he saw him past at his outward gate I cannot much commend the

extravagance of the feasting used at these readings; and that of his

lordship's was so terrible an example, that I think none hath ventured

since to read publicly; but the exercise is turned into a revenue, and a

composition is paid into the treasury of the society. Therefore one may

say, as was said of Cleomenes, that, in this respect, his lordship was

_ultimus herorum_, the last of the heroes. And the profusion of the best

provisions, and wine, was to the worst of purposes--debauchery,

disorder, tumult, and waste. I will give but one instance; upon the

grand day, as it was called, a banquet was provided to be set upon the

table, composed of pyramids, and smaller services in form. The first

pyramid was at least four feet high, with stages one above another. The

conveying this up to the table, through a crowd, that were in full

purpose to overturn it, was no small work: but, with the friendly

assistance of the gentlemen, it was set whole upon the table. But, after

it was looked upon a little, all went, hand over hand, among the rout in

the hall, and for the most part was trod under foot. The entertainment

the nobility had out of this was, after they had tossed away the dishes,

a view of the crowd in confusion, wallowing one over another, and

contending for a dirty share of it."

It would, however, be unfair to the ancient exercises of 'case-putting'

and 'mooting' not to bear in mind that by habituating successful

barristers to take personal interest in the professional capabilities of

students, they helped to maintain a salutary intercourse betwixt the

younger and older members of the profession. So long as 'moots' lasted,

it was the fashion with eminent counsel to accost students in

Westminster Hall, and gossip with them about legal matters. In Charles

II.'s time, such eminent barristers as Sir Geoffrey Palmer daily gave

practical hints and valuable suggestions to students who courted their

favor; find accurate legal scholars, such as old 'Index Waller,' would,

under judicious treatment, exhibit their learning to boys ambitious of

following in their steps. Chief Justice Saunders, during the days of his

pre-eminence at the bar, never walked through Westminster Hall without a

train of lads at his heels. "I have seen him," says Roger North, "for

hours and half-hours together, before the court sat, stand at the bar,

with an audience of students over against him, putting of cases, and

debating so as suited their capacities, and encouraged their industry.

And so in the Temple, he seldom moved without a parcel of youths hanging

about him, and he merry and jesting with them."

Long after 'moots' had fallen into disuse, their influence in this

respect was visible in the readiness of wigged veterans to extend a

kindly and useful patronage to students. Even so late as the close of

the last century, great black-letter lawyers used to accost students in

Westminster Hall, and give them fair words, in a manner that would be

misunderstood in the present day. Sergeant Hill--whose reputation for

recondite legal erudition, resembled that of '_Index_ Waller,' or

Maynard, in the seventeenth century--once accosted John Scott, as the

latter, in his student days, was crossing Westminster Hall. "Pray, young

gentleman," said the black-letter lawyer, "do you think herbage and

pannage rateable to the poor's rate?" "Sir," answered the future Lord

Eldon, with a courteous bow to the lawyer, whom he knew only by sight,

"I cannot presume to give any opinion, inexperienced and unlearned as I

am, to a person of your great knowledge, and high character in the

profession." "Upon my word," replied the sergeant, eyeing the young man

with unaffected delight, "you are a pretty sensible young gentleman; I

don't often meet with such. If I had asked Mr. Burgess, a young man upon

our circuit, the question, he would have told me that I was an old

fool. You are an extraordinary sensible young gentleman."

The period when 'readings,' 'mooting,' and 'case-putting' fell into

disuse or contempt, is known with sufficient accuracy. Having noticed

the decay of readings, Sir John Bramston writes, in Charles II.'s reign,

"At this tyme readings are totally in all the Inns of Court layd aside;

and to speak truth, with great reason, for it was a step at once to the

dignity of a sergeant, but not soe now." Marking the time when moots

became farcical forms, Roger North having stated that his brother

Francis, when a student, was "an attendant (as well as exerciser) at the

ordinary moots in the Middle Temple and at New Inn," goes on to say, "In

those days, the moots were carefully performed, and it is hard to give a

good reason (bad ones are prompt enough) why they are not so now." But

it should be observed, that though for all practical purposes 'moots'

and 'case-puttings' ceased in Charles II.'s time, they were not formally

abolished. Indeed, they lingered on throughout the eighteenth century,

and to the present time--when vestiges of them may still be observed in

the usages and discipline of the Inns. Before the writer of this page

was called to the bar by the Masters of the Society of Lincoln's Inn,

he, like all other students of his time, had to go through the form of

putting a case on certain days in the hall after dinner. The ceremony

appeared to him alike ludicrous and interesting. To put his case, he was

conducted by the steward of the inn to the top of the senior bar table,

when the steward placed an open MS. book before him, and said, "Read

that, sir;" whereupon this deponent read aloud something about "a femme

sole," or some such thing, and was still reading the rest of the MS.,

kindly opened under his nose by the steward, when that worthy officer

checked him suddenly, saying, "That will do, sir; you have _put_ your

case--and can sign the book." The book duly signed, this deponent bowed

to the assembled barristers, and walked out of the hall, smiling as he

thought how, by an ingenious fiction, he was credited with having put an

elaborate case to a college of profound jurists, with having argued it

before an attentive audience, and with having borne away the laurels of

triumph. Recently this pleasant mockery of case-putting has been swept

away.

In Roger North's 'Discourse on the Study of the Laws,' and 'Life of the

Lord Keeper Guildford,' the reader may see with clearness the course of

an industrious law-student during the latter half of the seventeenth

century, and it differs less from the ordinary career of an industrious

Temple-student in our time, than many recent writers on the subject

think.

Under Charles II., James II., and William III. the law-student was

compelled to muster the barbarous Law-French; but the books which he was

required to read were few in comparison with those of a modern

Inns-of-Court man. Roger North mentions between twenty and thirty

authors, which the student should read in addition to Year-Books and

more recent reports; and it is clear that the man who knew with any

degree of familiarity such a body of legal literature was a very erudite

lawyer two hundred years since. But the student was advised to read this

small library again and again, "common-placing" the contents of its

volumes, and also "common-placing" all new legal facts. The utility and

convenience of common-place books were more apparent two centuries

since, than in our time, when books of reference are always published

with good tables of contents and alphabetical indexes. Roger North held

that no man could become a good lawyer who did not keep a common-place

book. He instructs the student to buy for a common-place register "a

good large paper book, as big as a church bible;" he instructs him how

to classify the facts which should be entered in the work; and for a

model of a lucid and thoroughly lawyer-like common-place book he refers

"to Lincoln's Inn library, where the Lord Hale's common-place book is

conserved, and that may be a pattern, _instar omnium_."

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

PUPILS IN CHAMBERS.

But the most important part of an industrious law-student's labors in

olden time, was the work of watching the practice of Westminster Hall.

In the seventeenth century, the constant succession of political trials

made the King's Bench Court especially attractive to students who were

more eager for gossip than advancement of learning; but it was always

held that the student, who was desirous to learn the law rather than to

catch exciting news or hear exciting speeches, ought to frequent the

Common Pleas, in which court the common law was said to be at home. At

the Common Pleas, a student might find a seat vacant in the students'

benches so late as ten o'clock; but it was not unusual for every place

devoted to the accommodation of students in the Court of King's Bench,

to be occupied by six o'clock, A.M. By dawn, and even before the sun had

begun to break, students bent on getting good seats at the hearing of an

important cause would assemble, and patiently wait in court till the

judges made their appearance.

One prominent feature in the advocate's education must always be

elocutionary practice. "Talk; if you can, to the point, but anyhow

talk," has been the motto of Advocacy from time immemorial. Heneage

Finch, who, like every member of his silver-tongued family, was an

authority on matters pertaining to eloquence, is said to have advised a

young student "to study all the morning and talk all the afternoon."

Sergeant Maynard used to express his opinion of the importance of

eloquence to a lawyer by calling law the "ars bablativa." Roger North

observes--"He whose trade is speaking must not, whatever comes out, fail

to speak, for that is a fault in the main much worse than impertinence."

And at a recent address to the students of the London University, Lord

Brougham urged those of his auditors, who intended to adopt the

profession of the bar, to habituate themselves to talk about everything.

In past times law-students were proverbial for their talkativeness; and

though the present writer has never seen any records of a Carolinian

law-debating society, it is matter of certainty that in the seventeenth

century the young students and barristers formed themselves into

coteries, or clubs, for the practice of elocution and for legal

discussions. The continual debates on 'mootable days,' and the incessant

wranglings of the Temple cloisters, encouraged them to pay especial

attention to such exercises. In Charles II.'s reign Pool's company, was

a coterie of students and young barristers, who used to meet

periodically for congenial conversation and debate. "There is seldom a

time," says Roger North, speaking of this coterie, "but in every Inn of

Court there is a studious, sober company that are select to each other,

and keep company at meals and refreshments. Such a company did Mr. Pool

find out, whereof Sergeant Wild was one, and every one of them proved

eminent, and most of them are now preferred in the law; and Mr. Pool, at

the latter end of his life, took such a pride in his company that he

affected to furnish his chambers with their pictures." Amongst the

benefits to be derived from such a club as that of which Mr. Pool was

president, Roger North mentions "Aptness to speak;" adding: "for a man

may be possessed of a book-case, and think he has it _ad unguem_

throughout, and when he offers at it shall find himself at a loss, and

his words will not be right and proper, or perhaps too many, and his

expressions confused: _when he has once talked his case over, and, his

company have tossed it a little to and fro, then he shall utter it more

readily, with fewer words and much more force_."

These words make it clear that Mr. Pool's 'company' was a select

'law-debating society.' Far smaller as to number of members, something

more festive in its arrangements, but not less bent on furthering the

professional progress of its members, it was, some two hundred years

since, all that the 'Hardwicke' and other similar associations are at

the present.[29]

To such fraternities--of which the Inns of Court had several in the last

century--Murray and Thurlow, Law and Erskine had recourse: and besides

attending strictly professional clubs, it was usual for the students, of

their respective times, to practise elocution at the coffee-houses and

public spouting-rooms of the town. Murray used to argue as well as

'drink champagne' with the wits; Thurlow was the irrepressible talker of

Nando's; Erskine used to carry his scarlet uniform from Lincoln's Inn

Hall, to the smoke-laden atmosphere of Coachmakers' Hall, at which

memorable 'discussion forum' Edward Law is known to have spoken in the

presence of a closely packed assembly of politicians, idlers upon town,

shop-men, and drunkards. Thither also Horne Tooke and Dunning used to

adjourn after dining with Taffy Kenyon at the Chancery Lane

eating-house, where the three friends were wont to stay their hunger for

sevenpence halfpenny each. "Dunning and myself," Horne Tooke said

boastfully, when he recalled these economical repasts, "were generous,

for we gave the girl who waited on us a penny apiece; but Kenyon, who

always knew the value of money, rewarded her with a halfpenny, and

sometimes with a _promise_."

Notwithstanding the recent revival of lectures and the institution of

examinations, the actual course of the law-student has changed little

since the author of the 'Pleader's Guide,' in 1706, described the career

of John Surrebutter, Esq., Special Pleader and Barrister-at-Law. The

labors of 'pupils in chambers, are thus noticed by Mr. Surrebutter:--

"And, better to improve your taste,

Are by your parents' fondness plac'd

Amongst the blest, the chosen few

(Blest, if their happiness they knew),

Who for three hundred guineas paid

To some great master of the trade,

Have at his rooms by _special_ favor

His leave to use their best endeavor,

By drawing pleas from nine till four,

To earn him twice three hundred more;

And after dinner may repair

To 'foresaid rooms, and then and there

Have 'foresaid leave from five till ten,

To draw th' aforesaid pleas again."

Continuing to describe his professional career, Mr. Surrebutter mentions

certain facts which show that so late as the close of last century

professional etiquette did not forbid special pleaders and barristers to

curry favor with solicitors and solicitors' clerks by attentions which

would now-a-days be deemed reprehensible. He says:--