I have referred to the feasting that attended the appointment of the Readers. We have seen that medieval Universities were Guilds of Learning, scholastic fraternities of masters or students, who framed rules and exacted compliance with certain tests of skill, precisely in the same way as did the masters and apprentices of ordinary manual trades. It was a universal feature of the Guilds, whether of manual crafts or of Learning, that the newly-elected Master was expected to entertain the Fraternity to which he had been admitted, or in which he had just been raised to the full honours of Mastership. And just as at Oxford, Cambridge, or Paris, a Master was obliged to give a feast, or even some more sumptuous form of hospitality, such as a tilt or tourney, upon the attainment of his degree, so at the Inns of Court the newly-appointed Reader was obliged by custom to entertain the Benchers and Barristers in Hall. It was the general experience everywhere that such entertainments tended to increase in splendour and costliness, and to be a severe tax upon the resources of the new Masters, and a check, consequently, upon the number of aspirants. So here the excessive charges attending Readers’ feasts led to a decrease in the Readers, which was regarded as tending to ‘an utter overthrow to the learning and study of the Law,’ and the Justices of both Benches accordingly issued an order insisting upon their observance, and at the same time regulating the amount that a Reader might expend upon ‘diet in the Hall.’
Moots were a kind of rehearsal of real trials at the Bar. They were cases argued in Hall by the Utter and Inner Barristers before the Benchers.
When the horn had blown to dinner, says Dugdale, a paper containing notice of the Case which was to be argued after dinner was laid upon the salt. Then, after dinner, in open Hall, the mock-trial began. An Inner Barrister advanced to the table, and there propounded in Law-French—an exceedingly hybrid lingo—some kind of action on behalf of an imaginary client. Another Inner Barrister replied in defence of the fictitious defendant, and the Reader and Benchers gave their opinions in turn.
As in other Universities, other subjects besides Law were included in the educational curriculum.
‘Upon festival days,’ says Fortescue, who wrote in the seventeenth century, ‘after the offices of the Church are over, they employ themselves in the study of sacred and profane history; here everything which is good and virtuous is to be learned, all vice is discouraged and banished. So that knights, barons, and the greatest nobility of the kingdom often place their children in those Inns of Court, to form their manners, and to preserve them from the contagion of vice.’
As time went on, in fact, the Inns of Court gradually changed their character, and became a kind of aristocratic University, where many of the leading men in politics and literature received a general training and education.
And whilst Oxford and Cambridge, essentially more democratic, drew their students chiefly from the yeoman and artisan class, the Inns of Court became the fashionable colleges for young noblemen and gentlemen.
Throughout the Renaissance, indeed, the Inns of Court men were the leaders of Society, and the Gentlemen of the Long Robe laid down the law, not only upon questions of politics, but upon points of taste, of dress, and of art.
In the reign of Henry VI. the four Inns of Court contained each 200 persons, and the ten Inns of Chancery 100 each. The expense of maintaining the students there was so great that ‘the sons of gentlemen do only study the Law in these hostels.’
‘There is scarce an eminent lawyer who is not a gentleman by birth and fortune,’ says Fortescue; ‘consequently they have a greater regard for their character and honour.’