ANCIENT LEGAL EDUCATION IN THE INNS OF COURT.
SIR EDWARD COKE, in the preface to the second part of his Institutes, has these words : " After the making of Magna Charta and the Charta de Foresta, divers learned men in the laws, that I may use the words of the record, kept schools of the law in the City of London, and taught such as resorted to them the laws of the realm." He then quotes the writ of King Henry III. in the nineteenth year of his reign, by which he commanded the mayor and sheriffs of London to cause proclama tion to be made throughout it, that no one who kept Schools of Laws in the same city should thenceforth teach them there; and that, if there should be any one keeping schools of this kind, they were without delay to make him cease. " But this writ," he says, " took no better effect than it de served; for evil counsel being removed from the King, he in the next year . . . did by his Charter, under his great seal, confirm both Magna Charta and Charta de Foresta, he being then twenty-nine years old." Sir Edward Coke seems, therefore, to con sider the above-mentioned writ as intended to attack the memory of Magna Charta and the Charter of the Forest, by silencing, in an arbitrary and summary manner, legal teachers who based upon those documents instructions in the law of England. Sir William Blackstone, however, treats this writ as intended, by the suppression of unauthorized teachers, to sanction a new legal university arising on the Westminster side of the city, and which was ultimately constituted of the several Inns of Court and Inns of Chancery. It may be doubted whether the opinion that the lawyers were so early collected together will bear examination. Of Lin coln's Inn, Dugdale mentions a tradition,
as still current among the ancients, that the professors of the law were brought in to settle in that place by Henry, Earl of Lincoln, " about the beginning of King Edward II.'s time." This was rather more than seventy years after the nineteenth of Henry III. There is an account of Gray's Inn (formerly the property of the Lords Gray of Wilton) as having been held by a lease from them by students of the law in the time of King Edward III.; and the Temple is said to have been conveyed by the Knights Hospitallers to a society of law yers during the reign of the same king. It therefore seems reasonable to doubt that at the time when Henry III.'s writ was put forth, any legal university existed. Not much, however, is known about the Inns of Court and Chancery until the time of Henry VI. Sir John Fortescue, a great and famous lawyer, and chief justice of the King's bench at that time, has left us, in his little panegyric upon the laws of Eng land, a sketch of the inns as they then existed. He says that there were then be longing to the lawyers' university four Inns of Court, each containing two hundred per sons, and ten Inns of Chancery, and in each of them one hundred persons. Most of the students in the Inns of Chan cery were young, learning the first princi ples of the law; and as they advanced in learning and grew to riper years, they were admitted into the Inns of Court. In both the Inns of Chancery and Court, not only law, but also lighter accomplishments, were cultivated, — singing among the number. There, too, in the intervals of their study of the law, they appear to have given time largely to the study of the Scriptures and of chronicles; and the sons of persons of quality were placed there for the sake of general education, though their fathers did
