Age of Lawyers exhibition material

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This article offers a comprehensive and descriptive list of each piece included in Age of Lawyers, one of the Exhibitions at the Folger.

This exhibition was arranged into four sections: Legal Lives; The Great Courts; Law and Communities; and The King and the Law.

Legal Lives

Learning the Law

Many law students became lawyers and judges. Others, however, were young gentlemen with no plan of practicing law. They sought legal knowledge instead for social polish, advancement, and the practical skills needed to serve at court or manage an estate. Both the future lawyers and their fellow students were confronted by a challenging, technical field. Typically, a student started out at about 18 at one of the residential Inns of Chancery, where he learned basic property law and how to draft writs and pleadings. After three years or so, atabout 21, those who aspired to higher professional status—and could afford it—joined one of the four Inns of Court, graduating after several years when senior lawyers "called them to the bar."

Items Included

  • Wenceslaus Hollar. The Prospect of London and Westminster taken from Lambeth. Call number: MAP L85c no.2 copy 2.

The Inns of Court (Case 1)

Both lawyers and law students lived, studied, and worked at the Inns of Chancery and Inns of Court. With so many relatively young students in residence, the inns buzzed at times with song, dance, masques, pageants, rich dinners, and Christmas festivities. A century earlier, in 1470, Sir John Fortescue called them as much an "academy of manners" as a law school. Senior lawyers, who governed their own inns, saw themselves as part of the community. When the courts were not in session, for example, they gave lectures, called readings.

Items Included

  • John Strype. A survey of the cities of London and Westminster, and the borough of Southwark. ... Written at first in the year 1698, by John Stow, ... Corrected, improved, and very much enlarged, in the year 1720. London: 1754-55. Call number: 185-054 vol I; Displayed: plate facing leaf 8Y1 verso (page 728): plate 53, A Mapp of St. Andrews Holborn Parish.