The Rise Of The Barristers In Early Modern England

Viewing the British legal profession from afar,we tend to paint with a broad brush: wigged and robed barristers litigate in court,while suited solicitors do pretty much everything else.If the history of the Inns of Court is traced back into the obscurity of tradition,it will appear that for almost seven hundred years the Inns have been the abode of law and lawyers.The late sixteenth century is a crucial period for any understanding of the nascence of the modern English legal profession.The acts of our legislatures and all our various statutes have developed and aided and qualified and changed many common law principles,but however changed or qualified in particular matters,the common law remains as the great body of substantive rights upon which our jurisprudence is founded,and as such we are interested and concerned,or we ought to be interested and concerned,in its history and growth.This history and growth centers unoffcially at least in the Inns of Court,and because of this an outline of their establishment,growth and influence is interesting.The fifteenth century Black Books of Lincoln's Inn provide the best evidence of the early constitution of an Inn of Court,containing as they do direct evidence of the system under which the affairs of such an Inn were regulated;indirectly they may also provide some indications of the way in which all four Inns originated and developed in the medieval period.In modern times,and indeed for many centuries,the government of all the Inns has been in the hands of the benchers,a self-perpetuating oligarchy of senior members of each Inn,though the qualifications,functions and status of the benchers have of course changed fairly radically over the years.However,the power of the benchers is subject to a somewhat ill-defined supervisory and visitatorial control exercised by the judiciary.The internal grades within the Inns,as is generally admitted,appear to have been connected with the system under which moots were organised: benchers sat on the bench during argument,acting the part of judges,whilst outer and inner barristers appear to have played the part of senior and junior counsel in presenting argument.The increase in the size of the Inns,coupled with apathy on the part of the more junior members of the society,would tend to produce a concentration of power in the hands of the more senior members.The rise in the power of the benchers was probably connected with the increase in the importance of education in the affairs of the Inns,and their control over promotion within the society.In the course of the sixteenth century the process of enhancing the powers of the benchers may well have been accelerated by the tendency upon the part of government to treat the benchers as the persons responsible for the running of the Inns.By the close of the century the Inns had wholly changed their internal system of government,they had ceased to be democratically organised voluntary associations of lawyers.In the Middle Temple in 1502 and again in 1551 utter barristers were fined for failure to attend the parliament.Larson conceives professionalisation as a process of collective advancement towards market control and status gain.Central to this conception was the profession's ability to present a facade of homogeneity to the state,supported by the assertion of a standardised knowledge base and control of competition within the profession.It has been widely assumed that those admitted to the Inns,including the large proportion of ”non-professionals' ' who had no intention of following a legal career,received a training in the common law according to their various needs and capacities.