laid
aside their customary caution and strengthened Ferne's words with
inaccurate comment.

Thus Pearce says of the author of the 'Glory of Generositie'--"He was
one of the advocates for excluding from the Inns of Court all who were
not 'a gentleman by blood,' according to the ancient rule mentioned by
Fortescue, which seems to have been disregarded in Elizabeth's time."
Fortescue nowhere mentions any such rule, but attributes the
aristocratic character of the law-colleges to the high cost of
membership. Far from implying that men of mean extraction were excluded
by an express prohibition, his words justify the inference that no such
rule existed in his time.

Though Inns-of-Court men were for many generations gentlemen by birth
almost without a single exception, it yet remains to be proved that
plebeian birth at any period disqualified persons for admission to the
law-colleges. If such a restriction ever existed it had disappeared
before the close of the fifteenth century--a period not favorable to the
views of those who were most anxious to remove the barriers placed by
feudal society between the gentle and the vulgar. Sir John More (the
father of the famous Sir Thomas) was a Judge in the King's Bench,
although his parentage was obscure; and it is worthy of notice that he
was a successful lawyer of Fortescue's period. Lord Chancellor Audley
was not entitled to bear arms by birth, but was merely the son of a
prosperous yeoman. The lowliness of his extraction cannot have been any
serious impediment to him, for before the end of his thirty-sixth year
he was a sergeant. In the following century the inns received a steadily
increasing number of students, who either lacked generous lineage or
were the offspring of shameful love. For instance, Chief Justice Wray's
birth was scandalous; and if Lord Ellesmere in his youth reflected with
pride on the dignity of his father, Sir Richard Egerton, he had reason
to blush for his mother. Ferne's lament over the loss of heraldric
virtue and splendor, which the inns had sustained in his time, testifies
to the presence of a considerable plebeian element amongst the members
of the law-university. But that which was marked in the sixteenth was
far more apparent in the seventeenth century. Scroggs's enemies were
wrong in stigmatizing him as a butcher's son, for the odious chief
justice was born and bred a gentleman, and Jeffreys could boast a decent
extraction; but there is abundance of