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

Life at the "Third University"

Law students often studied for a year or two at one of England's only two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, before they started their legal education. By Shakespeare's day, the Inns of Court and Chancery were sometimes called the "third university"—a term meant as an admiring metaphor, rather than literally. Students at the inns, as in any era, had to find their footing. The letters shown here discuss trouble finding a place to stay and the timeless need for more money from home.

Reading, Notes, and Study

Learning the common law was, in large part, an oral tradition. Students attended the central Westminster courts and took notes—in "law French"—on how the cases were argued and the court's reasoning. At the inns, readings or lectures were heard in person, and legal debates called moots were organized over hypothetical cases. But students also spent time with Year Books, unofficial records of past cases organized by the years of a monarch's reign. Other books, too, were considered worthy of study; in keeping with the legal culture of the time, some were printed and others were only in manuscript. Students kept "commonplace books" of key points or lines of argument as well.

  • Francis Bacon 1561-1626. The learned reading of Sir Francis Bacon, one of her Majesties learned counsell at law, upon the Statute of Uses: being his double reading to the Honourable Society of Grayes Inne. Published for the common good. London: 1642. Call number: B301 copy 3 Bd.w. STC 20889.5; Displayed: title page.
  • John Perkins. A profitable booke of Master Iohn Perkins felow of the Inner Temple treating of the lawes of Engla[n]d. London: Richard Tottell, August 31, 1581. Call number: STC 19637 copy 2; Displayed: 121a
  • John Rastell. An exposition of certaine difficult and obscure words, and termes of the lawes of this realme, newly set forth and augmented, both in Frenche and English, for the helpe of such yong students, as are desirous to attaine to the knowledge of the same. London: Richard Tottel, 1592. Call number: STC 20708 copy 2; Displayed: folio 112v-113r.
  • Sir Henry Finch. Nomotechnia, viz. the art of law or a description of the common lawes of England according to the rules of art together with all the cheife and principall statutes comeinge in their places whereby the common law is inlarged abridged or any way altered from the beginneinge of Magna Charta made 9 H. 3 to the end of the fourtyeth yeare of her late maties. most gratious raygne. Manuscript, 1607. Call number: V.a.320, Folio 2; Displayed: folio 2r.