Chancery were heirs to good estates, and were trained to become their
wealth rather than to increase it--to perfect themselves in graceful
arts, rather than to qualify themselves to hold briefs. The same was the
case in the Inns of Court, which were so designated--not because they
prepared young men to rise in courts of law, but because they taught
them to shine in the palaces of kings. It is a mistake to suppose that
the Inns of Court contain at the present time a larger proportion of
idle members, who have no intention to practise at the bar, than they
contained under the Plantagenets and Tudors. On the contrary, in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the number of Templars who merely
played at being lawyers, or were lawyers only in name, was actually as
well as relatively greater than the merely _nominal_ lawyers of the
Temple at the present time. For several generations, and for two
centuries after Sir John Fortescue wrote the 'De Laudibus,' the
Inns-of-Court man was more busied in learning to sing than in learning
to argue a law cause, more desirous to fence with a sword than to fence
with logic.

"Notwithstanding," runs Mulcaster's translation of the 'De
Laudibus,'[23] "the same lawes are taught and learned, in a certaine
place of publique or common studie, more convenient and apt for
attayninge to the knowledge of them, than any other university. For
theyr place of studie is situate nigh to the Kinges Courts, where the
same lawes are pleaded and argued, and judgements by the same given by
judges, men of gravitie, auncient in yeares, perfit and graduate in the
same lawes. Wherefore, euerie day in court, the students in those lawes
resorte by great numbers into those courts wherein the same lawes are
read and taught, as it were in common schooles. This place of studie is
far betweene the place of the said courts and the cittie of London,
which of all thinges necessarie is the plentifullest of all cities and
townes of the realme. So that the said place of studie is not situate
within the cittie, where the confluence of people might disturb the
quietnes of the studentes, but somewhat severall in the suburbes of the
same cittie, and nigher to the saide courts, that the studentes may
dayelye at their pleasure have accesse and recourse thither without
weariness."

Setting forth the condition and pursuits of law-students in his day, Sir
John Fortesque continues; "For in these greater inns, there can no
student bee