The " Black Books " of Lincolns Inn.
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THE "BLACK BOOKS" OF LINCOLN'S INN. BY EDWARD MANSON, Of the Middle Temple, Barrister at Law. ONE of the things which strike us most in a survey of mediaeval London is the little community with its compact corporate life. Whether its raison d'etre is trade as in the City Guild, or religion as in the monastery, or learning as in the college, or law as in the Inns of Court and Inns of Chancery, we find the same characteristics—a small soci ety—complete in its constitution, living to gether in close intimacy, with its hall or refectory to minister to the needs of the body, its library to minister to the needs of the mind, its chapel to minister to the needs of the soul. The same tendency to associ ate for a common end shows itself today. Societies to promote politics and education, charity and religion, art and philan thropy, are legion: the difference is that there is not today that social life in common symbolized in the word company or guild— the breaking of bread together—which char acterized the early societies. The Inns of Court furnish a good illustration of the change. The life in one of the Inns of Court of the Fifteenth Century as we have it pictured for us in, for example, the "Black Books" of Lincoln's Inn was much more like what life is now, at an Oxford or Cam bridge college than in Lincoln's Inn of today. Just as in Oxford or Cambridge you have the undergraduates, the graduates and the Dons, so in the Inns of Court you had the "clerks," the "utter barristers" and the Masters of the liench. All were socii of the "Felyschippe" and all lived under strict rules, none the less binding that many of them were unwritten and customary like the common law itself.
CHIEF JUSTICE FORTESCUE ON THE INKS OF COURT. The earliest general account we have of
the Inns of Court and Chancery is that of Sir John Fortescue—the Chief Justice of the King's Bench under Henry VI. in the De Laitdicns Angliœ Legum—written by him when in exile in France after the crushing defeat of the Lancastrians at Towton in 1461. Fortescue was himself one of the Benchers of Lincoln's Inn at the date when the "Black Books" begin (1431) and there is, therefore a special interest in com paring his account of the Inn with that of the Records themselves. "There belong, he says, "to it—that is to the system of legal education in England— ten Lesser Inns which are called the Inns of Chancery (Furnival's Inn, Thavies' Inn, Barnard's Inn, Staple's Inn, Clement's Inn, New Inn, Lyon's Inn, Dane's Inn, Clifford's Inn and Strand Inn), in each of which there are a hundred students at the least and in some of them a far greater number, though not constantly residing. The students are, for the most part, young men; there they study the nature of original and judicial writs which are the very first principles of the Law. After they have made some progress here and are more ad vanced in years they are admitted into the Inns of Court properly so called. Of these there are four in number (Lincoln's Inn, Gray's Inn, the Inner and the Middle Temple.) In that which is the least fre quented there are about 200 students. In these greater Inns a student cannot well be maintained under eight and twenty pounds a year ("about £500 of our money") and, if he has a servant to wait on him—as for the most part they have—the expense is pro portionally more. For this reason the students are sons to persons of quality, those of an inferior rank not being able to bear the expenses of maintaining and edu
