and the entry referred to describes 12 as keeping their third Christmas, 7 as keeping their second Christmas, and 12 as keeping their first Christmas.
It can hardly, therefore, be doubted that we have here a list of persons who may be described in University Language as "in statu pupillari," and that those who were keeping their third Christmas cannot have been admitted later than 1420. Now the admissions for the years following 1422 averaged eight a year, and applying this average to the 96 persons before mentioned, it follows that some of them must have been admitted as early as, if not earlier than, 1408.
The question still remains whether the names of some of the 96 are those of the first or original Members of the Society, or, putting it another way, at what date did the Society come into being ? If the internal evidence supplied by the Black Book is to be relied on, and this appears to be the best evidence obtainable, there can be no doubt the Society must have been in existence for many years before 1422.
This evidence may be shortly stated.
The Black Book does not refer to any of the Members as first or original, nor does it contain any reference to any previous volume, and it is probably, therefore, the first book in which the Society kept a connected record. The entries to which reference has been made, look as if the person who made the original entries on the first seven folios had 'opened the book' in 1422 by putting down the main stock in trade of the Society, i.e., the Members from whom the revenues of the Inn were collected, and followed this by the entry dated 1422 of those assigned to keep Christmas. It is nowhere stated by whose authority the entries are made, and indeed it is not until the year 1512, that a Keeper of the Black Book is mentioned, and the actual appointment of a Member of the Bench to that office is first recorded in the year 1519.
But the earliest minutes of the Black Book disclose a body bearing a corporate name, "Societas de Lincoln's Inn," with a formed and well established Constitution ; its "Rulers or Governors" following one another in an apparently organized sequence, with authority over the Members, property and discipline of the Society, and enforcing their decisions and authority by censure, fine, suspension or expulsion ; a settled form of admission based on suretyship, and an equally settled system of call to the Bar and invitation to the Governing Body. Such a state of things cannot have come suddenly into existence, but must have been the growth of many years.
This conclusion is supported to some extent by the tenor of the Treatise De Laudibus Legum Angliæ written by Sir John Fortescue, about the year 1468. This eminent Chief Justice of the King's Bench (born about 1394) was a Member of Lincoln's Inn, and a Governor of the Inn in 1425, 1426 and 1429 ; and is probably the John Fortescue, Junior, mentioned (folio 2b) in the earliest list of sureties in the volume under consideration.
In his Treatise he deals with the Inns of Court and Chancery, putting them as Institutions on the same footing as the Universities which had then been nearly three centuries in existence, and as established places of education for the sons of the "Knights, Barons and the Greatest Nobility of the Kingdom," where they obtained the knowledge
