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that they should be entered or recorded in Latin. The deeds were drawn in the same language; the laws were composed in that idiom, and no other tongue was used at court. It became, says Hume, the language of all fashionable company; and the English themselves ashamed of their own country, affected to excel in that foreign dialect. At Athens, and even in France and England, formal and prepared pleadings were prohibited, and it was unlawful to amuse the court with long, artful harangues; only it was the settled custom here, in important matters, to begin the pleadings with a text out of the holy scriptures. It is of late years that eloquence was admitted to the bar. The account which the learned judge Hale gives of the lawyers, who pleaded in the 15th century, does them little honour. He condemns the reports during the reigns of Henry IV. and V. as inferior to those of the last twelve years of Edward III. and he speaks but coolly of those which the reign of Henry VI. produces. Yet this deficiency of progressive improvement in the common law arose not from a want of application to the science; since we learn from Fortescue that there were no fewer than two thousand students attending on the inns of chancery and of court, in the time of its writer. Gray's-inn, in the time of Henry VIII. was so incommodious, that "the ancients of this house were necessitated to lodge double." Indeed until the beginning of the last century the lawyers lived mostly in their inns of court, or about Westminster-hall. But a great change has been effected; they are all now removed to higher ground, squares and genteel neighbourhoods, no matter how far distant from their chambers. The number of judges in the courts of Westminster was by no means certain. Under Henry VI. there were at one time eight judges in the court of common pleas. Each judge took a solemn oath that "he would take no fee, pension, gift, reward, or bribe, from any suitor, saving meat and drink, which should be of no great value." In 1402, the salary of the chief justice of the king's bench was forty pounds per annum. In 1408, the chief justice of the common pleas had fifty-five marks per annum. In 1549, the chief justice of the king's bench had an addition of thirty pounds to his salary, and each justice of the same bench and common pleas, twenty pounds. At this time, a felony under the value of twelve pence, was not a capital offence; and twelve pence then was equal to sixt
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