6. MAITLAND: THE RENAISSANCE 199 It was 1758 before Blackstone began his ever famous course at Oxford. The chair that I cannot fill was not established until the transatlantic Cambridge was setting an example to her elderly mother.^^ But then, throughout the later middle age English laW had been academically taught. No English institutions are more distinctively English than the Inns of Court ; of none is the origin more obscure. We are only now coming into possession of the documents whence their history mu3t be gathered, and apparently we shall never know much of their first days.®*^ Unchartered, unprivileged, unendowed, without remembered founders, these groups of lawyers formed themselves and in course of time evolved a scheme of legal education: an academic scheme of the medieval sort, oral and disputatious. For good and ill that was a big achievement: a big achievement in the history of " Thayer, The Teaching of English Law at Universities in Harvard Law Review, vol. ix., p. 171: " Blackstone's example was immediately followed here. ... In 1779 ... a chair of law was founded in Virginia at William and Mary College . . . and in the same year Isaac Royall of Massachusetts, then a resident in London, made his will, giving prop- erty to Harvard College for establishing there that professorship of law which still bears his name." The Royall professorship was actually founded in 1815 {Officers and Graduates of Harvard, 1900, p. 24). At Cambridge (England) the Downing professorship was founded in 1800. "" See Records of the Honorable Society of Lincoln's Inn, 1896 ff . ; Calendar of the Records of the Inner Temple, 1896. The records of Gray's Inn are, so I understand, to be published. See also Philip A. Smith, History of Education for the English Bar, 1860; Joseph Walton, Early History of Legal Studies in England, 1900, read at a meeting of the American Bar Association in 1899. In foreign countries there were gilds or fraternities of lawyers. Thus in Paris the avocats and procureurs about the middle of the fourteenth century formed a fra- ternity of St. Nicholas: " dont le chef porte le baton ou banniere (de la le nom de batonnier) ": Brissaud, Histoire du droit frangais, p. 898. But, though a certain care for the education of apprentices was a nat- ural function of the medieval craft-gild, I cannot find that elsewhere than in England fraternities of legal practitioners took upon themselves to educate students and to give what in effect were degrees, and degrees which admitted to practice in the courts. R. Delachenal, Histoire des avocats au parlement de Paris (Paris, 1885), says that, though not proved, it is probable that already in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- turies the avocat had to be either licenciS en lois or licenci4 en ddcret: in other words, a legal degree given by an university was necessary for the intending practitioner. As regards the England of the same age two interesting questions might be asked. Was there any considerable number of doctors or bachelors of law who were not clergymen? Had the English judge or the English barrister usually been at an univer- sity? I am inclined to think that a negative answer should be given to the first question and perhaps to the second also. Apparently Little- ton (to take one example) is not claimed by Oxford or Cambridge.
