The Passing of the Serjeant. himself a member of the brotherhood, says of the earliest Serjeants, that being clerks or religious men, bound by their order to shave their heads, they were allowed to cover their bald pates with a thin linen • cap, hence they got the name " Serjeants of the Coif." These coives, he tells us, were soon after changed from linen to white silk, and every Serjeant was clothed in a long robe such as priests wore, with a lamb-skin cape about his shoul ders, and a hood with two "labels" on it, "that the people should show the greater respect as well to their Persons as to their Professions." It appears that in the course of time the white silk of the coif gave place to black, and also that this headgear shrunk from full size to a mere black patch on the top of the Ser jeant's wig. This black patch came finally to be about the only distinguishing mark in dress between a Serjeant and other members of the bar. And, by the way, an amusing story is told in this connection. Serjeant Allen and Sir Henry Keating Q. C. were on one occasion opposed in a case at the Assize Court in Stafford. After the trial, in which they had given it to each other pretty hot, they vere walking along arm in arm together towards their lodgings, when they overheard the following conversation between two men who had followed them from the court. " If you were in trouble Bill, which of those two tip-top 'uns would you have to defend you?" "Well, Jim," was the reply, " I should pitch upon that one," pointing to the Q. C. "Then you'd be a fool," said the other, "the fellow with the sore head is worth six of him." There were several grades of Serjeants-atLaw. There was the Kings Chief Serjeant, the first of these, Dugdale says, being created in 1321. Next below him were the two An cient or eldest Serjeants; then the Serjeants with patents of precedence, and finally the ordinary Serjeants. The first two grades when left vacant many years ago, were not again filled.
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The plain Serjeant, of late years, occupied an intermediate plane between Her Majesty's Counsel and the rest of the bar. The Ser jeant with a patent of precedence stood equal with the Queen's Counsel, the only difference being their manner of creation, and the fact that while the Q. C. had only a professional rank, the Serjeant had a social rank as well. Sometimes the legal title was confounded in the public mind with the military, as when Serjeant Ballantine, being counsel in a courtmartial case, was invited to dine with the Welsh Fusiliers. When he presented him self and announced his name and title to the orderly, he was informed, with a scornful air, that it was an officers' mess. Ballantine ex plained that he was a Serjeant of quite an other kind, and he was admitted. The Serjeants' decline from their high estate — and it was high, for they once ranked next to knights and before compan ions •— was due to the throwing open of the Court of Common Picas to the whole bar in discriminately in 1846. As one of the last of the order has put it " with this our raison d' être ceased;" and the Act of 1875, pre viously mentioned, was the finishing blow to an already moribund institution. Of all the pomp and proceeding at the mak ing of a Serjeant-at-Law in the olden time, the ring-giving seems to have been the only part to survive. Latterly there were no great feasts of roasted godwits and knotts and chevvet pies; no comfits, no hippocras, but only a simple ceremony with very few wit nesses. Serjeant Robinson one of the last of the line, describes the affair as follows : "On the creation of a Serjeant a number of gold rings, about twenty-eight, had to be ' bestowed by him on several persons of differ ent grades — the Queen, the Chancellor, the Judges, and the Master of Common Pleas. Even the chief usher of that Court received one, but it dwindled down to a hoop of not much greater breadth than a curtain ring, and about a tenth of its thickness. Her Majesty's ring was a very massive affair,
