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pretty clearly defined. Such a growth is in some respects a subject rather for the student of sociology than of legal history; but it is so connected with the latter that it cannot be passed over in any view we take of English law at the end of the thirteenth century. Before the end of it "there already exists a legal profession, a class of men who make money by representing litigants before the courts and by giving legal advice. The evolution of this class has been slow, for it has been withstood by certain ancient principles. The old procedure required of a litigant that he should appear before the court in his own person and conduct his own cause in his own words. For one thing, the notion of agency, the notion that the words or acts of Roger may be attributed to Ralph because Ralph has been pleased to declare that this shall be So, not of any great antiquity. In the second place so long as procedure is very formal, so long as the whole fate of a law-suit depends upon the exact words that the parties utter when they are before the tribunal, it is hardly fair that one of them should be represented by an expert who has studied the art of pleading:-John may fairly object that he has been summoned to answer not the circumspect Roger, but the blundering Ralph; if Ralph cannot state his own case in due form of law, he is not entitled to an answer. Still in yet ancient days a litigant is allowed to bring into court with him a party of friends and to take 'counsel' with them before he pleads. In the Leges Henrici it is already the peculiar mark of an accusation of felony that the accused is allowed no counsel, but must answer at once; in all other cases a man may have counsel. What is more, it is by this time permitted that one of those who are of counsel with him' should speak for him.

The extreme captiousness of the old procedure is defeating its own end, and so a man is allowed to put forward some one else to speak for him, not in order that he may be bound by that other person's words, but in order that he may have a chance of correcting formal blunders and supplying omissions. What the litigant himself has said in court, he has said once and for all, and he is bound by it; but what a friend has said in his favour he may disavow. The professional pleader makes his way into the courts, not as one who will represent a litigant, but as one who will stand by the litigant's side and speak in his favour, subject, however, to correction, for his words will not bind his client until that client has expressly or tacitly adopted them. Perhaps the main object of having a pleader is that one may have two chances of pleading correctly. Even in the thirteenth century one may see the pleader disavowed. One John de Planez in his pleading for William of Cookham called Henry II. the grandfather instead of the father of King John; William disavowed the plea and the advocate was amerced for his blunder. And so before any one is taken at his pleader's words it is usual for the court to ask him whether he will abide by those words. Just because the pleader makes his appearance in this informal fashion, as a mere friend who stands by the litigant's side and provisionally speaks on his behalf, it is difficult for us to discover whether pleaders are commonly employed and whether they are already members of a professional class. The formal records of litigation take no notice of them unless they are disavowed" (i).

History of English Law, Vol. I. p. 190.

We have here a clear and graphic description of the position of the advocate: he is just ceasing to be, to use a legal phrase, "the next friend" of the litigant or the prisoner, and is becoming a professional and paid agent, skilled in one particular kind of work and retained for a particular purpose-namely, of acting as counsel in court. As the right of obtaining the assistance of a representative before the judges became recognised and common, the growth of a class of men to act as advocates is part of the ordinary and natural evolution of particular classes, of an advance into a more artificial state of society. As soon as we find, as is the case in the reign of Edward I., that the king has a number of pleaders who are known as his servants or "serjeants" at law, we may at once accept the fact as evidence of the existence of this particular class and of the completion of the period of growth.

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A curious and interesting point in regard to this subject is the fact that, even at this early period in the history of English law, the class of attorneys was not the same as the class of advocates. The attorney was. at first merely an agent ad hoc; he was not a man of one profession; he was placed by the litigant as his "agent to gain or lose in some particular plea; the abbot appointed a monk and the baron his steward. If a more extensive agency was required, a man had to obtain the power of delegation by means of a royal writ, and he had to show some reason for his demand; the grantee of the writ must be going abroad on the king's business or be incapacitated by age or sickness. In time the same names begin to appear; it is easy indeed to understand how, in a particular locality, two or three persons should get into

the habit of acting as attorneys when the justices in eyre came round, and how in time there should thus be found a number of persons familiar with the increasing formalities of the law, and willing, for a recompense, to save a litigant the trouble of attending to legal matters. But the reason for the growth of two separate classes of lawyers is not visible. In 1280 the corporation of London directed as to the civic courts that "no countor was to be an attorney." Of the cause of this direction we are ignorant, nor does the History of English Law give us any help. “We see a group of counsel, of serjeants and apprentices on the one hand, and a group of professional attorneys on the other, and both of them derive their right to practise from the king, either mediately or immediately." Such was the state of things at the end of the thirteenth century, and if we were to hazard a suggestion as to this remarkable and longcontinued division of the legal class in England it would be that it sprang from the same spirit of exclusive trading which produced the various gilds for commercial purposes, and from the same spirit of exclusiveness, of which selfinterest was at the bottom, which gave in the medieval times various rights to certain classes of the community, which, while they benefited those who possessed them, were a corresponding detriment to those who were without them.

Whilst justice was found throughout the country there were here and there some exceptions to its equal incidence. One instance is to be found in regard to serfdom. This subject belongs in some respects to the social as much as the legal history of our country, but in some respects also it has an important bearing on the state of English law in

the Middle Ages. In legal phraseology all men were either freemen or slaves; the latter were called servi, villani, or nativi the three terms representing one and the same idea. But this serfdom was not absolute, it was relative, and in fact may well be called prædial:

"In the first place, it rarely, if ever, happens that the serfs are employed in other work than agriculture and its attendant processes; their function is to cultivate their lord's demesne. In the second place, the serf usually holds more or less land, at least a cottage, or else is the member of a household whose head holds land, and the services that he does to his lord are constantly regarded in practice as the return which is due from him in respect of his tenement. . . . In the third place, his lord does not feed or clothe him; he makes his own living by cultivating his villein tenement, or, in case he is but a cottager, by earning wages at the hands of his wealthier neighbours. In the fourth place, he is seldom severed from his tenement, he is seldom sold as a chattel, though this happens now and again: he passes from feoffor to feoffee, from ancestor to heir, as annexed to the soil" (k).

The villein was thus in relation to his lord a slave, he had no proprietary right as against him, he was in theory as much his chattel as the goods in his castle; but the serfdom was a link between two persons: it was essentially relative, for as regards persons other than his lord, the serf had nearly all the rights of a freeman. When the lord was not concerned, the criminal law made no difference between bond and free. "A blow given to the

() History of English Law, Vol. I. p. 397.

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