The Inns of Court

by Cecil Headlam

And John Ferne, a student of the Inner Temple, wrote,[9] in 1586, especially commending the wisdom of the regulation that none should be admitted to the Houses of Court except he were a gentleman of blood, since ‘nobleness of blood, joyned with virtue, compteth the person as most meet to the enterprizing of any publick service.’

Shortly after the accession of James I., a royal mandate denied admission to a House of Court to anyone that was ‘not a gentleman by descent.’

‘The younger sort,’ says Stow (1603), ‘are either gentlemen, or the sons of gentlemen, or of other most welthie persons.’

It is one of the almost unvarying features of a Guild that a fixed period of apprenticeship must be served before admission to be a Master. The term of apprenticeship in the Inns of Court has varied with each Society, and in different epochs.

In June, 1596, the period of probation which must be spent by a student in attending preliminary exercises in the Inns, before graduating in Law, was limited by an ordinance of the Judges and Benchers to seven years. Before that date the ‘exercises’ necessary for ‘a call to the Bar’ occupied eight years, during which twelve grand moots must be attended in one of the Inns of Chancery, and twenty petty moots in term time before the Readers of one of the greater Societies.

But in 1617, in a ‘Parliament’ of the Benchers of the Inner Temple, it was ordained that ‘no man shall be called to the Bar before he has been full eight years of the House.’ Nor was lapse of time to be considered sufficient without proportionate acquisition of learning. Only ‘painful and sufficient students’ were to be called, who had ‘frequented and argued grand and petty moots in the Inns of Chancery, and brought in moots and argued clerks’ common cases within this House.’ A proviso against outside influence was added by the injunction that ‘anyone who procured letters from any great person to the Treasurer or Benchers in order to be called to the Bar, should forever be disqualified from receiving that degree within that House.’

In the seventeenth century, however, ‘readings’ and ‘mootings’ alike fell into desuetude, and official instruction practically disappeared. The Inns became merely formal institutions, residence within the walls of which, indicated by the eating of dinners, was alone necessary for admittance to the Bar. The loss of the Law was the gain of Letters. A new class of students, educated in literature and politics, and highly born, were bred up to take their place in the direction of affairs and the criticism of writers.

‘When the “readings” with their odds and ends of law-French and Latin went out into the darkness of oblivion, polite literature stepped into their place. “Wood’s Institutes” and “Finch’s Law” shared a divided reign with Beaumont and Fletcher, Butler and Dryden, Congreve and Aphra Behn. The “pert Templar” became a critic of belles lettres, and foremost among the wits, whereas his predecessors had been simply regarded by the outer world as a race that knew or cared for little else save black-letter tomes and musty precedents. Polite literature ultimately came to clothe the very forms of law with an elegance of diction not dreamed of in the philosophy of the older jurists, and thus deprived an arduous study of one of its most repellent features.’[10]

Another cause which greatly contributed to the brilliant record of the Inns as homes of Literature and the Drama, as well as of the Law, was the rule which, up till quite a few years ago, compelled Irish Law-students to keep a certain number of terms in London prior to ‘call’ at the King’s Inn, Dublin. Daniel O’Connell, at Lincoln’s Inn, Curran, Flood, Grattan, the orators; Tom Moore, the poet, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the dramatist, at the Temple, are among the later ‘Wild Irishmen’ who owed something to the London Inns in accordance with this rule, and rewarded the Metropolis with their eloquence and wit.

In modern times the need of general regulations as to qualification by the keeping of terms and of examinations as a guarantee of competency has been recognized.