Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/715

 19. ZANE: THE FIVE AGES 701 settlements, superseding entails, preserved many a Royalist estate. The Iiins of Court during the Tudor and earlier Stuart reigns had continued to enjoy great prosperity. From For- tescue's time to Charles I., it is almost impossible to point to a single lawyer of standing who had not been prelimi- narily educated at Oxford or Cambridge. In the reign of Queen Mary attorneys and solicitors were forever excluded from the Inns. Henceforth only barristers were trained in those institutions, and attorneys became objects of contempt. In fact, in an order in 16 Charles II., an attorney is called " an immaterial person of an inferior character." The instruction in the Inns continued to be the same as in Fortes- cue's time. The law was now all case-law. Fitzherbert says that the whole Court agreed that Bracton was never taken for an authority in our law. In social entertainments the Inns shone. Costly feasts, magnificent revels, masks, and plays, where the royal family attended, the splendid celebrations of calls of Serjeants, the feasts given by the readers, are all fully described in contemporary annals. We read of " spiced bread, comfits and other goodly conceits, and hippocras,'* and the bill of supply of one of the feasts, comprising " twenty-four great beefs," " one hundred fat muttons," " fifty-one great veales," " thirty-four porkes," " ninety-one piggs," through endless capons, grouse, pigeons and swans to three hundred and forty dozen larks, shows that the vice of the time was gluttony. It was found necessary during this period to restrain the students. Some of the regulations are curious, — the pro- hibition of beards of over a fortnight's growth, of costly apparel, of the wearing of swords; and the restraints on sports point to unruly members in the Inns. It was found necessary to make attendance at the moots compulsory. The standard of attainment was raised. Ten years' attendance was required before a call to the bar; this was afterwards put back to five years, and then raised to seven ; and for three years after his call, a barrister was not permitted to practice before the courts at Westminster. The Commonwealth time was almost destructive of the ■y