hat he was
quite in error in thinking that lawyers had increased so greatly in
number. From a MS. in Lord Burleigh's collection, it appears that in
1586 the number of law-students, resident during term, was only 1703--a
smaller number than that which Fortescue computed the entire population
of the London law-students, at a time when civil war had cruelly
diminished the number of men likely to join an aristocratic university.
Sir Edward Coke estimated the roll of Elizabethan law-students at one
thousand, half their number in Fortescue's time. Coke, however, confined
his attention in this matter to the Students of Inns of Court, and paid
no attention to Inns of Chancery. Either Hatton greatly exaggerated the
increase of the legal working profession; or in previous times the
proportion of law-students who never became barristers greatly exceeded
those who were ultimately called to the bar.

Something more than a hundred years later, the old cry against the
low-born adventurers, who, to the injury of the public and the
degradation of the law, were said to overwhelm counsellors and
solicitors of superior tone and pedigree, was still frequently heard in
the coteries of disappointed candidates for employment in Westminster
Hall, and on the lips of men whose hopes of achieving social distinction
were likely to be frustrated so long as plebeian learning and energy
were permitted to have free action. In his 'History of Hertfordshire'
(published in 1700), Sir Henry Chauncey, Sergeant-at-Law, exclaims: "But
now these mechanicks, ambitious of rule and government, often educate
their sons in these seminaries of law, whereby they overstock the
profession, and so make it contemptible; whilst the gentry, not sensible
of the mischief they draw upon themselves, but also upon the nation,
prefer them in their business before their own children, whom they
bereave of their employment, formerly designed for their support;
qualifying their servants, by the profit of this profession, to purchase
their estates, and by this means make them their lords and masters,
whilst they lessen the trade of the kingdom, and cause a scarcity of
husbandmen, workmen, artificers, and servants in the nation."

That the Inns of Court became less and less aristocratic throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there is no reason to doubt; but it
may be questioned whether it was so overstocked with competent working
members, as poor Sir Henry Chauncey imagi