Legal London

The legal profession really had two centers in London: the area around the Inns of Court along the western edge of the City and Westminster.  Linking these were the Strand and King Street, the main thoroughfares of the western suburbs before the 1660s, which ran past the houses of several great nobles and through Whitehall Palace.  The legal districts therefore straddled the royal court, enhancing opportunities for lawyers and law students to pursue the patronage of the King and his ministers,  

The medieval great hqall of Westminster Palace housed the main common law courts of King's Bench and Common Pleas, where most important trials involving property disputes were held.  Two other important courts, Chancery and Star Chamber, met nearby.  In addition to lawyers and judges, litigation in these courts forced many landowners to spend time in the vicinity of Westminister as their cases were heard.  The Inns of Court housed the chambers of barristers, so-called because they had been examined by the judges and admitted to come within the bars marking the outer limits of the common law courts and plead cases.  (This is the origin of the modern concept of the bar exam).  Most lawyers never passed the bar, remaining "solicitors" who prepared documents that had to be turned over to a barrister before they reached trial.  In the early modern period solicitors did not usually attend one of the Inns of Court but trained through  apprenticeship, often in a country town. A sixfold growth in the number of solicitors during the late sixteenth century had accompanied a substantial increase in litigation.  This greatly increased demand for the barristers' services, enriching the more successful.  It also threatened to give lawyers a bad name, as pettyfoggers who stirred up quarrels and protracted suits to increase their fees.  But the growth of litigation and of legislation affecting the roles of country magistrates that happened in the same period also made it more important for gentlemen to acquire at least a smattering of legal knowledge.        

To acquire that knowledge they attended the Inns of Court, which had functioned since the Middle Ages as law schools, where students read the standard legal texts, visited the courts in Westminster to observe their sessions and performed "moots" or mock trials under the supervision of senior barristers.  As early as the fifteenth century some gentlemen also used the Inns of Court as a base from which to pursue a career in royal service.  In the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century both kinds of attendance grew rapidly.  As this happened the Inns developed their own subculture, shaped by their residents strong interest in court gossip and politics, their cultivation of humanist intellectual culture and rhetorical skills valued at Whitehall, and their proximity to London's theatres and bookstalls.  Some students began writing and circulating their own poetry, almost entirely through manuscript copies.  John Donne and the dramatists John Marston and Richard Massigner all emerged from this environment. 

The legal profession and Inns of Court were also influenced by the rise of antiquarianism, a species of historical study that focused on analysis of the origins of specific customs and institutions, rather than the writing of narrative accounts of events.  Legal antiquarianism led to an intense interest in the records of the common law, kept in the Tower of London, and any other evidence illuminating the common law's history.  In the early seventeenth century a veritable cult of legal custom and precedent developed, in part as a form of resistance to perceived abuses of authority by James I and Charles I.  Its most famous protagonist was Sir Edward Coke, Attorney General under Elizabeth and for a time Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas in the reign of James I.  On the other hand the Stuarts also found many supporters within the legal profession, who gathered precedents favorable to the Crown.  A few individuals assembled private collections of legal and antiquarian documents.    The most important private collector of manuscripts in the early seventeenth century, Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, owned a house containing his library immediately adjacent to Westminster Hall.  He allowed other researchers, lawyers and politicians to use the materials he assembled, until Charles I sealed his library in 1631.  

The legal profession therefore contributed materially to the development of the culture of scribal publication of controversial political material discussed elsewhere on this site.

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