Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/445

419 A MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH LEGAL EDUCATION. 419 Oxford a course of lectures on English law, not for law students, but for country gentlemen and general scholars, which attracted at once the attention of King and people, brought their author sud- den rank, fame, and fortune, and when published as Blackstone's Commentaries became as much the accepted compendium of law in this country as in their own. Nor are we here to discuss the picturesque anachronisms of the Inns of Court, to tell how an official was wont to call the students in Norman French to the daily feasting, or of the social license and legal and political con- servatism of these ancient and inscrutable bodies. Venerable semi-monastic foundations as they are, they have the traditions of having been great schools of law with learned moots and wrangles, and they have had readers, so called, who gave read- ings on the law in their solemn halls. They alone have for cen- turies had the power to call to the bar, and they still maintain that uncontrolled authority. But, if we may trust Mr. Montagu Crackanthorpe, who is by every one quoted as the best authority on legal education in England, in his testimony given in 1892 before the Gresham Commission, although it had been a moral duty, if not a legal duty, on the part of all of the Inns, and a legal duty on the part of the two greater ones, the Middle and the Inner Temples, to educate law students, at least from the time of the charter of James I., yet nothing except the delivery of a few sporadic lectures was done until 1832. At a meeting of the Hardwicke Society in the Inner Temple Lecture Hall, December 4, 1896, Mr. C. Cavanagh quoted the Let- ters Patent under which the Middle and Inner Temple acquired most of their property, issued the 13th of August in the sixth year of James I. unto Sir Julius Caesar, then Chancellor and Under Treasurer of the King's Exchequer, and others, granting them the mansions with the gardens and appurtenances therein described '* for lodgings, reception, and education of the professors and students of the laws of this realm." And Mr. Cavanagh declared, The solicitors had been as free of the Inns of Court as the bar- risters until about the middle of the sixteenth century, when they were banished and left without any share therein. So about the beginning of this century they were absolutely destitute of any means of legal education except as they picked it up in the office of older attorneys. A stir was made about this, after many years
 * This beyond all question is a trust."