were often blamed for delays which were in fact caused by barristers.1 In the same year-1831-it was decided to oppose a bill before parliament which proposed that a general registry of deeds should be set up. A petition was presented to both houses, and the secretary was authorised to go up to London as often as he thought necessary to consult with the deputations from other law societies anxious about this matter.2 In 1833 proceedings were threatened against an unqualified person who had prepared a lease, but were dropped on his apologising to the society for his presumption. In the next year, in protest against the recent seizing and opening of parcels sent by the Mail Coach, members were advised to send their parcels for London by the Paul Pry coach, which also was claimed to provide a speedier service. Much publicity was given to this, but the legality of the proposed course was questioned, and the matter was dropped.

There were sixteen founder members of this society, all except one of whom practised in Gloucester itself. By 1835 some eightyfive more attorneys had joined, and by that date members were drawn from all over Gloucestershire and Wiltshire.

The Birmingham Law Society was founded in 1818.3 There were nineteen founder members, and by 1830 there were some fifty members. The purpose of the society was declared to be the 'promoting and encouraging a correct and liberal course of practice in the profession; and of discountenancing and opposing all practices that may have a tendency to bring it into discredit or to lessen its respectability'. There was to be a general meeting every year, and a basic subscription of £1; the treasurer was to call on members for additional sums when necessary. Members had to be attorneys of at least two years' standing, resident within ten miles of the centre of the city.

4

The first meeting of the society was held on 3 January 1818, in the Royal Hotel. It was proposed that a Law Library should be set up in a convenient room in the centre of the city, and the committee was instructed to communicate with those 'gentlemen in London concerned to prevent improper persons acting as con

1 This presumably refers to 1 and 2 William IV, c. 56.

2 The setting up of a registry of deeds was delayed until 1925.

" I am indebted to the secretary and the librarian for permission to examine the minutes of the society.

4 In 1819 a room was rented from the Birmingham Philosophical Society; it was given up in 1822 as an unnecessary expense.

veyancers'. In August the committee presented its first report. Its members stated that they had watched the progress of the insolvent debtors' bill and the bankruptcy bill 'until they were thrown out of the House of Lords', and had communicated with the members for the county concerning several objectionable clauses in these bills. They had also been in touch with those who were drawing up the conveyancers' bill, and had presented petitions in support of it, and they assured the society that although the bill had had to be withdrawn in the current session, they felt certain that it would pass in the next. They had also corresponded with the London Law Society, and had arranged that they should be sent the names of all those seeking admission at the beginning of each term so that they could inquire into the character of such of them as had served their clerkships in the neighbourhood of Birmingham. The Law Chronicle and Smith's Lists were to be taken for the benefit of members. Representations had been made to the chairman of the Warwick Quarter Sessions about the inconvenient arrangements of the Nisi Prius Court.1 It was laid down as a rule of practice to be followed by members that 'except where attorneys are agreed upon by parties, leases shall be prepared by the leasor's attorney unless the lease is in the nature of a sale'.

The society's minutes show that it continued to maintain this energetic concern for professional interests. In 1820 it was resolved to ask all the Inns of Court to supply the society with the names of any persons from the Birmingham area who applied to be admitted as conveyancers-the perennial subject-so that inquiries could be made as to their 'fitness and respectability'. In 1824 an attorney was struck off the Roll at the society's instigation, and the committee was instructed to watch the progress of any bills which might be introduced for the recovery of small debts, in order to prevent the public from being deprived of its right to appear by attorney.

By 1828 the committee's reports show it acting as a fully developed and responsible professional body. It pointed out that it was due to the Birmingham Law Society that the practice of Gray's Inn in admitting unqualified persons who afterwards took out certificates as qualified conveyancers had been stopped, and added: "...if anything were wanting to evince the usefulness of an association of the respectable members of the profession, it is fully estab

1 It was reported, in February 1820, that the court had been altered so as to be more convenient for attorneys.

R

lished by the benefit that must result to the public at large and to the profession by the measure above mentioned'. The committee expressed its concern at the 'alarming increase in the number of the profession-the applications for admission in Michaelmas Term next are no less than 204, being at the rate of 816 a year'. They felt that this increase could be more effectively curbed by limiting the number of clerks articled to an attorney at any one time to one, than by increasing the stamp duty on articles of clerkship, and impressed upon the society the great importance of this subject for the whole profession.

In October the society, like that in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, considered the proposal to set up a general registry of deeds. The Birmingham Law Library Society, which was founded in February 1831, amalgamated with the Law Society after only eighteen months of independent existence.

The Kent Law Society was founded with twenty-nine members in 1818, 'to promote fair and liberal practice and prevent abuses in the profession'.1 Members were to dine together at Maidstone on the day following Commission Day at the Assizes. The early meetings were held at the Rose Inn, Sittingbourne, and were concerned with revising charges for conveyancing. The society heard complaints against members, contributed 10 towards a fund raised in 1822 to assist the widow and eleven children of an attorney of Stratford on Avon who had been accidentally killed, and in 1831 this society also drew up a protest against the proposed bill for establishing a general registry of deeds and instruments affecting real property.

Some remarks may be added about the Sunderland Law Society, which the present society believes to have been founded in 1824.2 Its principal objects were to 'preserve the privileges and support the credit of attorneys and solicitors, to promote fair and liberal practice, and to adopt such measures as may appear best calculated to effect these ends and most likely to secure respect to the profession and to be of advantage to the employers'. The rules of the

1 This information is derived from a pamphlet published for the society in 1948, sent to me by the secretary.

2 This information is derived from a copy of the rules of the society sent to me by the secretary.

society were familiar to those of the other societies already described -there is almost a common form of declaring the initial purpose of the societies by this time-but there are two additional rules. It was decided that 'in order to protect and preserve the respectability of the profession no member shall take an articled clerk without receiving with him a fee of One hundred pounds nor shall he give any salary or allowance of any description whatever to a clerk during the time he is under articles nor contract to give him any after the expiration thereof in consideration of his service'. It was further laid down that members who had to appoint commissioners in bankruptcy cases, or any other commissions issued out of chancery, should appoint members of the society only. At a special general meeting held in the same year a scale of charges to be made by members was adopted.

All these societies exhibit very clearly in their constitutions and in their activities those aims which the would-be reformers of the profession were beginning to insist on in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The very language they use is remarkable in its similarity: 'liberal', 'respectable'-these are the key words of these minute books as they are of the pamphlets of the period. The societies are among the first effective and responsible professional bodies to be founded, and they set an example which was quickly followed by attorneys all over the country, and provided a pattern along which other professional societies were to develop in the future. Of course they were neither so numerous nor so efficient as they were later to become: they had no need to be. And while it may truly be said of them, as Sir John Clapham said of the early Chambers of Commerce, established in these same decades by similar sorts of men, that although characteristic British organisations, [they] played only a subordinate part in the life of the country',1 the part they played in the profession then, and as exemplars for the future, was not without importance.

1 Economic History of Modern Britain, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1950), 1, 310. See also the article by J. M. Norris on 'Samuel Garbett and the Early Development of Industrial Lobbying in Great Britain', in Economic History Review, 2nd series, x, 3 (1958), pp. 450–60.

CHAPTER V

THE MAKING OF AN ATTORNEY

IN the education of the attorney the Inns of Chancery played little, and eventually no part.1 They never performed for the profession those services which the Inns of Court rendered the barristers. In spite of the repeated injunctions of the judges that all attorneys should belong to one or other of these Inns, they continued to decline throughout the seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth century they were of negligible importance in the history of attorneys and solicitors. Those services which they could have performed by giving institutional representation and control to the profession were taken over by bodies specially created for this purpose which have just been described.

There were two general reasons for this decline. In the first place, the profession became too large for the Inns to hold all its members, who were in any case too widely scattered in the provinces for membership of an Inn to be anything more than nominal. This was probably true of an increasingly large proportion of the profession, as the country attorney became an established figure in provincial life, relying on an agent in London to perform those functions for his clients which demanded personal attendance at the courts or law offices in town. In the second place, the Inns of Chancery declined because the sort of education they could provide -occasional readings by some barrister from the Inns of Court which patronised them2-was totally inadequate as a training for the sort of work which the attorney was called upon to do. His employment was eminently practical in character, concerned with the forms of legal processes and the application of the laws to a wide variety of situations: he was judged by his acquaintance with the techniques of the law, rather than by his knowledge of its more theoretical aspects.

This being so, the obvious way in which to educate the attorney, the apprenticeship system, was the one adopted. No amount of

1 See above, pp. 7–8; the history of the Inns of Chancery is noticed by Holdsworth, History of English Law, II, IV, VI, and XII.

2 Cf. Holdsworth, op. cit. XII, 41.