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.