The Seven Lamps of Advocacy

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

VII
THE LAMP
OF FELLOWSHIP

VII
THE LAMP OF FELLOWSHIP

An advocate lacking in fellowship, careless of the sacred traditions of brotherhood which have kept the lamp of fellowship burning brightly for the English Bar through many centuries, a man who joins the Bar merely as a trade or business, and does not understand that it is also a professional community with public ideals, misses the heart of the thing, and he and his clients will suffer accordingly.

Fitzjames Stephen wisely said of the English Bar that it is “exactly like a great public school, the boys of which have grown older, and have exchanged boyish for manly objects. There is just the same rough familiarity, the general ardour of character, the same kind of unwritten code of morals and manners, the same kind of public opinion expressed in exactly the same blunt, unmistakable manner.”

The very title of Inns of Court is redolent of hospitality, fellowship, and even conviviality. How many glorious things have their beginnings at an inn! How pleasant it would be to investigate with the antiquarians the earliest origins of our Inns of Court! But to come to comparatively modern days, Sir John Fortescue, who was Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in the time of Henry VI., gives us a pleasant picture of their traditions of fellowship. These Inns of Court, or hostels, he says, anciently received the sons of noble men and the better sort of gentlemen, “who did there not only study the laws to serve the courts of justice and profit their country, but did further learn to dance, to sing, to play on instruments on the ferial days and to study divinity on the festival, using such exercises as they did who were brought up in the King’s Court.” There were Inns of Chancery, too, where the younger students learned the first elements of law before they were taken into the greater hostels, which were called Inns of Court. The expenses of the student were no less than twenty marks a year in Fortescue’s day, and if he was attended by his servant, as most were, that was an added charge, so that only the sons of gentlemen could afford so expensive an education.

At this time a young fellow would come from the university, or perhaps straight from the grammar-school, and would learn the first elements of law in one of the ten minor Inns of Chancery, and would then apply for admission to one of the four houses or Inns of Court: Inner or Middle Temple, Gray’s Inn or Lincoln’s Inn. There they continued for the space of seven years, attending readings, moots—where cases were put and discussed—and “boltings,” as the practice arguments were called, “whereby,” as Fortescue tells us, “growing ripe in the knowledge of the laws, and approved withal to be of honest conversation, they are either by the general consent of the benchers or readers (being of the most ancient, grave, and judicial men of every Inn of Court), or by the special privilege of the present reader there, selected and called to the degree of utter (outer) barristers, and so enabled to be common counsellers and to practise the law both in their chambers and at the bars.”

The whole social scheme of education and control in the exercise of professional rights and advancement was most carefully thought out. An utter barrister of not less than ten or twelve years’ standing and “of good profit in study” was chosen as reader to educate the students. At about fifteen years’ standing he became a bencher, after which he might be appointed a serjeant, and go away to Serjeants’ Inn, that important society “where none but serjeants and judges do converse,” and from which alone could judges be chosen.

It was for this reason that the judges always addressed a serjeant as “Brother.” I can well remember as a boy feeling a certain glow of satisfaction at hearing the judges in the Tichborne trial calling my father “Brother Parry,” and it seems a pity that this fraternal greeting, this courteous link of fellowship between Bench and Bar, necessarily disappeared with the abolition of Serjeants’ Inn. Yet, though the talisman is no longer spoken, the spirit of brotherhood will always be with us.

In the old days education in the law was undertaken very seriously, but in a fraternal spirit. The reader would propound a case, the utter barristers would declare their opinion, the reader would confute the objections laid against him, and the students would eagerly note the learned points of the seniors. These readings took four or five hours daily, and were held in the halls. The moots and the boltings took place after supper, and at other times among the students under the leadership of a barrister.

But the whole term was not taken up with the dry study of the law. There were feastings, grand nights, and, greatest of all, the Christmas Saturnalia, at one of which, after a costly dinner, a pack of hounds was brought into the hall, a fox and a cat were let loose, and a mad hunt took place. Isaac D’Israeli gives an excellent account of these wild doings, taken from a rare tract supposed to have been written in 1594. “Supper ended,” he writes, “the constable-marshal presented himself, with drums playing, mounted on a stage borne by four men, and carried round; at length he cries out, ‘A lord, a lord,’ &c., and then calls his mock court every one by name.