‘Apprentice’ is a term that smacks of the Guild, and though in the fifteenth century it came to be applied to the Serjeants themselves, it must originally have denoted the students who sat at the feet of some recognized teacher of the Law. But, in truth, we have not enough evidence to enable us to trace the developments of the relationship between the Serjeants, the Students, and the Inns. The fact that the Serjeants, or Doctors of Law, upon attaining that degree, entirely severed their connection with their Inns, and that it was the Masters, and not they, who formed the governing bodies of the Inns, may be significant of some early difference or antagonism between the original Serjeants-and Apprentices-at-Law.
The custom of tolling a newly-elected Serjeant out of Lincoln’s Inn by ringing the chapel bell—‘a half-humorous, half-serious reminder that hence-forward he was dead to the Society’—may be considered to support this view.[79]
The obscurity of this question is enhanced, not only by the lack of documentary evidence, but also by the fact that the technical terms of the profession had no stationary significance. Apprenticii ad legem was a fluid phrase; it came to be applied to the genuine junior apprentices of the law in the Inns of Chancery, to the senior students who instructed them, as well as to those who had completed the eight years’ curriculum of the University, and, having passed their examinations, were admitted to practise as advocates in Court, to the very Serjeants and Judges themselves.
We have seen how the topography of the Inns of Court—and of London itself—is bound up with the history of the Crusades and the Order of Templars who sprang from them. It is supposed that the Order of Serjeants, these Professors of the Common Law, who acquired the exclusive privilege of practising in the Court of Common Pleas, imitated the second degree of the Old Templars, and derived their name from the ‘free serving brethren’ of the Order of the Temple. The word Serjeant is said to translate the Latin Servientes, and the King’s Servants-at-Law, Servientes domini Regis ad legem, were, it is suggested, the lineal descendants of the fratres servientes, the servant brethren, of the Knights Templars. The peculiar dress of the ‘Order of the Coif’ is advanced as an argument in support of this fascinating pedigree. The Serjeants-at-Law marked their rank, it is suggested, by wearing red caps, under which, as in the East, a linen cap, or coif, was worn. Did the Templars bring this habit from the East, and were their first ‘servants’ Mohammedan prisoners? At any rate, the coif proper was a kind of white hood made of lawn (later of silk), which completely covered the head like a wig, and whilst the later black patch represented the cornered cap worn over it, the true vestigial representative of the coif is to be found in the white border of the lawyer’s wig.[80] A connection may be traced between the white linen thrown over the head of a Serjeant on his creation and the white mantle in which the novice was clothed when, in the Chapel of St. Anne, he was initiated into the Order of the Knights Templars, and declared a free, equal, elected and admitted brother.
In this connection it is at least noteworthy that the Serjeants had a cult for St. Thomas of Acre (Thomas à Becket), and that in the Chapel of their patron Saint, adjoining the Old Hall of the Temple, they used to pray before going to St. Paul’s to select their pillars. The Knights of St. Thomas in Palestine were placed at Acre under the Templars in the Holy Land, and a Chapel dedicated to St. Thomas of Acre was built for them. Can it be that the Serjeants trace from the subservient Order of the Knights of St. Thomas?
There is some trace of an ecclesiastical origin, not only in their ‘long, priest-like robes,’ which Fortescue describes, ‘with a cape, furred with white lamb about their shoulders, and thereupon a hood with two labels,’ but also in their performance of a rite, which none but priests might offer, in a solemn ceremony that lasted down to the Reformation. When feasts were held in the Temple Hall, the Serjeants, in the middle of the feast, went to the Chapel of St. Thomas of Acre in Cheapside, built by Thomas à Becket’s sister after his canonization, and there offered; and then to St. Paul’s, where they offered at St. Erkenwald’s shrine; then into the body of the Church. Here they were appointed to their pillars by the Steward of the feast, to which they then returned.
The theory has, indeed, been advanced that the coif was a device for covering the tonsure of ecclesiastical pleaders after clerics had been forbidden to practise in the secular Courts. But this explanation seems too ingenious.
The ceremony of choosing a pillar at St. Paul’s, referred to above, points to the ancient practice of the Lawyers taking each his station at one of the pillars in the Cathedral, and there waiting for clients. ‘The legal sage stood, it is said, with pen in hand, and dexterously noted down the particulars of every man’s case on his knee.’[81]
It long remained the custom of the Law-Courts to adjourn at noon. Then the Serjeants would repair to the ‘Parvis,’ or porch, of St. Paul’s to meet their clients in consultation. And this practice is alluded to by Chaucer:
‘A serjeant of the law ware and wise,
That often had y been at the “Parvise,”
There was also, full rich of excellence.
Discreet he was, and of great reverence;
He seemed such, his words were so wise.
Justice he was full often in assize,
By patent and by pleine commissioun.’
‘Prologue,’ Canterbury Tales.