Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/660

 646 V. BENCH AND BAR ing the assizes through the different counties, distributed the royal justice throughout the country. The different local tribunals were subjected to a close scrutiny. In fact, the holding of an eyre was regarded by the inhabitants rather as an oppressive thing. The justices inquired into all the affairs of the counties and into all the acts of the local tribunals, into the enforcement of the criminal law and into the judgments rendered in civil causes. The numerous fines imposed made royal justice the source of an imposing rev- enue. About this time the clergy were forbidden by the Pope to study the temporal law, and were inhibited from sitting in lay tribunals. The lawyer ecclesiastics, like Raleigh, Pateshull, William of York, Robert de Lexington, and Brac- ton, were soon to pass away. While ecclesiastical chancel- lors remained for centuries, the common law was about to become the heritage of laymen. The lay lawyers are learned men. Fitz Peter, Segrave, Braybroc, Multon and Thur- kelby are all cases in point. But the most noticeable thing is that a class of advocates, who practice in the courts, has grown up, and that the judges are uniformly selected from among the profession. The Serjeants at law and the appren- tices at law now form a distinct body of men, devoting them- selves solely to the practice. This separate class needed but schools of law to make it a closed body of men, admission to which required special attainments. This want was soon to be supplied by the Inns of Court, where the common law was taught as at a university. Everywhere the need of retaining good lawyers was felt. This is enforced by the judges. In one of the first Year Books, the reporter makes the Chief Justice say : " B loses his money because he hadn't a good lawyer." A few remarks of this sort from the bench would soon prevent an appearance in court by any one ex- cept a trained lawyer. The division of the profession into barristers and attor- neys had already appeared — a distinction that endures to our own day in England.^ The barrister appears only for Germanic ideas and the contrast between an attornatua or anwalt and a
 * The origin of this distinction, taking us back to the more primitive