day after the promulgation of their notice affixing a penalty, Grizel did turn, and on November 27 the Benchers decreed that all orders heretofore made in this House touching beards shall be void and repealed.' And the Judges, having at last discovered a point of interference which they could not maintain, discreetly held their peace. But that such an order could have been accepted even for a moment surely proves that obedience to the Judges was a part of some generally recognized agreement which brought with it its own compensation and reward.

By what process of selection and with what forms apprentices were admitted to the Bar immediately after the Statute of Edward I, and before the times of which written chronicles survive, we know nothing. There is no record extant of what John de Mettingham and his colleagues did upon the receipt of Edward I's order. There never appears to have been (till 1868) a roll on which barristers were officially recorded barristers qua barristers. But one need hardly be surprised at this when the same thing has to be said of the Serjeants. They, too, never appear to have been officially recorded.

The conclusion, then, at which I arrive is this: that authority to call to the Bar was granted by Edward I, with statutory confirmation, to the Judges exclusively, and that the Judges have constituted the Benchers of the Inns of Court their deputies for this purpose. The Benchers call to the Bars of their respective Inns, and the Judges receive at the Bar of the Court without further form or ceremony those whom the Benchers, as their authorized deputies, have called. And this reception by the Judges, without verbal expression, and consisting of nothing more than a tacit permission to a barrister called to the Bar of his Inn by the Benchers of his Inn to appear at the Bar of the Courts unchallenged, seems to have consequences of some technical importance. By long custom we describe ourselves, and are officially and authoritatively described, as barristers-at-law. Now at our call the Benchers of our Inns do not constitute us, nor do they profess to constitute us, barristersat-law. We are called, as has been noted, only to the Bar of our own Inn-exactly what that may be I must not here stop to consider. How and when, then, do we become barristers-at-law? I take it that it is when we are received by the Judges; and that it is reception by them, in accordance with some long lost or, may be, never formally recorded agreement between them and the Benchers of the Inns of Court, that clothes us with the fuller status. There seems no other time when, and no other means by which, it can be acquired. If this be so, the question arises whether a barrister who has never taken his seat in Court, and has, consequently, never

been received by the Judges, is entitled to describe himself or to be described as anything more than a barrister of his own Inn of Court. It may be fairly assumed, however, that since 1868, when the Barristers' Roll was constituted by the Judges, the signing of that roll is accepted by them as a form of reception. And as the older general Swearing Roll, though not strictly homogeneous with the newer one 1, in that it was the creation of Parliament, and not of the Judges, was signed by barristers qua barristers, and was so signed by them within the Courts, we may suppose that the signing of this roll from the first year of William and Mary to the passing of the Promissory Oaths Act in 1868 was also accepted as a form of reception.

In further confirmation of the view that a 'call' by an Inn of Court does not constitute a barrister-at-law it may be mentioned that Waterhouse's lengthy definition of an Utter Barrister 2 makes no reference to the right of audience, the one all important note and privilege of a barrister-at-law. Waterhouse

is defining only the barrister as his own Inn of Court creates him. For the complete fulfilment of his status, for the enlargement of the Barrister of an Inn of Court into a Barrister-at-law, he must go to those to whom alone the Sovereign gave the necessary authority-the Judges.

I come now to the second question which I propose to discuss, the complete supersession of the appellation apprentice' by the appellation barrister.' It has been stated in the foregoing pages that there is practically no doubt that the Inns of Court, or the organizations which were the immediate predecessors and parents of the present Inns of Court, were founded by the apprentices after 1292 as a means of qualifying themselves for the new privileges which had been granted to them. The apprentices admitted to the right of audience under the order to John de Metyngham appear to have been distinguished from their uncalled' brethren by the appellations of apprentices of the court' and 'apprentices of the law.' That these two appellations described the same set of men, and not, as might possibly suggest itself, called and uncalled apprentices respectively, appears clear from the facts that we find Apprentices of the Law' coupled with Serjeants in an assessment of Richard II; and that there still survives an order by 'the honourable and puissant prince, the Duke of Bedford, the King's lieutenant,' by the assent of the lords spiritual and temporal assembled in this present parliament,' calling upon certain dilatory apprentices of the law to lose no further time, under heavy penalties,

1 See The Barristers' Roll, Law Quarterly Review, xxiii. p. 438. 2 Fortescutus Illustratus, p. 544.

8 2 Rich. II (1379), 3 Rot. Parl. 58.

in obeying the King's commands to take upon themselves the 'estate of Serjeant1.' The still extant references to apprentices, eo nomine, are very few, even at a time when we are sure that the appellation was in daily use, and so no argument for its disappearance at any particular date can be founded upon the failure to find instances of its use.

But with the foundation of the new quasi-corporate institutions, involving new methods of legal training, a new nomenclature more in accordance with the new condition of things seems to have been invented. If the apprentices were so named because they were apprentices to definite personal masters, sc. the Serjeants, such an appellation would become meaningless when they looked for their teaching and training not to an individual personal master but to the Society of which they were members. We do not know exactly when Lincoln's Inn, the most ancient of the Inns of Court, was founded, but its still extant Black Books go back as far as 1422; and it is clear that there must have been earlier ones even than these. We may fairly date the foundation of the Inn many years before 14202. Now, not in the very earliest extant records of Lincoln's Inn is there any mention of apprentices. Amongst the apprentices themselves, as soon as they had founded these societies for their teaching and training, and by so doing ceased to look for them to any individual personal master, the appellation apprentice seems to have become obsolete, the thing expressed by it having ceased to exist. The appellation they invented in its stead to describe themselves was 'barrister,' apparently derived from the barrae or forms on which they sat during their classes for instruction and moots. The first use of the word barrister which I have been able to trace occurs exactly where, if this theory be correct, we should expect to find it, in the Black Books of Lincoln's Inn. The date is Trinity Term, 1454-53. And, as previously, that is to say from 1292, the appellation apprentice had included both 'called' and ' uncalled' apprentices, so now and for a long time subsequently, the appellation barrister included both those upon whom had been conferred the right of audience, and those who were still preparing and qualifying themselves for it. The former were called Utter Barristers, the latter Inner Barristers. They were so called, says Waterhouse, from the positions which they respectively occupied on the forms or barrae in the halls of their Inns +.

15 Henry V (1417), 4 Rot. Parl. 107 b.

2 'It appears, therefore, safe to infer that the Society was founded many years previous to 1420.' Preface to the printed transcript of Lincoln's Inn Admissions, P. vii. Herbert and Sulyard . . . are two of the best barristers of the Inn.' Printed transcript of the Black Books of Lincoln's Inn, vol. i, p. 26.

Fortescutus Illustratus, p. 544..

As the years roll on the appellation Utter Barrister is probably felt to be a little ponderous, but, as the uncalled members of the Inns are Inner Barristers, the qualifying adjective cannot be dropped without causing some confusion; and at last the use springs up of referring to the uncalled Inner Barristers as students, and then the qualifying and distinguishing 'Utter' is dropped, and we have barristers and students simply. The disappearance of the appellation Inner Barrister seems to date from about 1590. In the Black Books of Lincoln's Inn under the date of June 23, 1590, we have 'all utter barristers and gentlemen under the bar.' We get a step further on July 10, 1606, in some suffycient studyentes now under ye Barr'; and, finally, on November 17, 1629, we attain the nomenclature of to-day in 'The petition of the Barristers and the Students of this Society touching the Library.'

But outside the Inns of Court the appellation Barrister did not at once come into general use. The old appellation of Apprentice seems to have died out before the new one actually-outside the Inns of Court-supplanted it. In the Year Books of Henry VI we find several instances of counsel, who do not appear to have been Serjeants, and who would, in the circumstances, have been described as apprentices of the Court a few years earlier, and as barristers a few years later, being described simply as men 'learned in the

law 1.'

It is true that readers of Waterhouse and Dugdale will find in the books of those authors a good deal about apprentices at a much later date than Henry VI. Waterhouse, indeed, gives an elaborate definition of an apprentice as late as 16632. But there is absolutely nothing in any of the records of the Inns of Court to give any support or authority to this definition; and if there is any historic truth in it or real foundation for it, it would seem to be merely as the definition of the conditions which barristers had to fulfil before they were colloquially known amongst their fellows at that time. as apprentices. And Dugdale tells us that the word had changed its meaning in his time; it used, he says, to mean a student-he does not say when and for how long; now it means a Double Reader 3. The appellation had, in fact, ceased to be an official or technical one, and had become a merely popular one, meaning one thing at one time and another at another.

That I may not omit anything of which I am aware that bears on the subject, I must mention that Plowden on the title-page of

1 'Homes erudite en le ley,' M. 21 Hen. VI, fo. 15, pl. 30. 'Home appris en ley,' H. 34 Hen. VI, fo. 25, pl. 3. 'Home appris de le ley de terre,' M. 39 Hen. VI, fo. 21, pl. 31.

"Fortescutus Illustratus, p. 138.

3 Origines Juridiciales, p. 143.

6

6

his Reports' calls himself in 1578 'un Apprentice de le comen ley,' and that Sir Henry Finch in 1613 on the title-page of his 'Nomotechnica' describes himself as Apprentice del ley'; and other similar instances could probably be adduced. Even as late as 1839 Lord Campbell (then Attorney-General) spoke of himself as 'an apprentice of the law. Of all these I think we may fairly and reasonably say that they were unadvised uses of the appellation, merely a kind of sentimental re-echoing of a long past away name, dear to the recollection. But all this is really by the way, for no one would contend that the appellation of apprentice, for counsel under the degree of Serjeant, had not been superseded by that of barrister even in Plowden's time; and this supersession of the former appellation by the latter seems naturally and reasonably assignable to the facts that apprentices in any real sense of the word ceased to exist after the foundation of the Inns of Court; that the Inns of Court invented the new appellation of barrister to describe the class of men who had been formerly called apprentices; and that the scope of this appellation became gradually narrowed, as we have seen, till it included only those upon whom, through the mediation of the Inns of Court, the right of audience was conferred.

An undergraduate of tradition was called upon in one of his examinations to prove Euclid I. 5. Subsequently asked by his tutor if he had succeeded in doing so, he replied, 'Well, "prove" is a strong word, but I made it highly probable.' I will not say more than the undergraduate.

Since writing the foregoing paper I have happened upon an old will preserved at Somerset House, dated St. Bartholomew's Day, 24 August, 1404 2. It was executed by John Bownt of Bristol, and is written in Latin. It contains the following bequest amongst others. Item lego Johanni Beoff apprenticio curiæ et socio meo dilecto xl solidos ... nova statuta mea...' The testator's profession is not stated, but his possession of the statutes, some other details in the will, and especially his mention of an apprentice of the Court as his 'socius,' make it seem probable that he was an apprentice of the Court himself. This suggests the possibility of a partnership between apprentices of the Court.

Again, the testator mentions the names of two apprentices (not apprentices of the Court) as his own apprentices, bound for a term of years; and one of these two at least was in some sort of relationship also with his 'socius' John Beoff. This suggests another question. Did apprentices of the Court have uncalled' apprentices

1 The Serjeants' case, p. 116.

2 Register-Book, Marche, 8.