Just Another Day in Chancery Lane: Disorder and the Law in London's Legal Quarter in the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

Scarcely any turbulence, quarrels or disturbance ever occur there, but delinquents are punished with no other punishment than expulsion from communion with their society, which is a penalty they fear more than criminals elsewhere fear imprisonment and fetters. For a man once expelled from one of these societies is never received into the fellowship of any other of those societies. Hence the peace is unbroken and the conversation of all of them is as the friendship of united folk. 1 This was Sir John Fortescue's idealised account to the exiled prince of Wales, Edward of Lancaster, of the peace-loving nature of London's Inns of Court and Chancery in the mid-fifteenth century. Fortescue was not concerned with the reality, which, as he knew all too well, was different. He was concerned to impress upon his young pupil the perfection of the English law and of the education of its practitioners, rather than the imperfections that existed in a society that the Prince, as he explicitly told him, would never experience. Few who were familiar with the legal quarter that surrounded the Inns would have recognised the Arcadia Fortescue described. Far from being the peaceful and well-ordered district the former chief justice invoked, in the period when he wrote the area to the west of London's Temple Bar was a liminal space, populated by--among others--large numbers of young trainee lawyers, in which the kind of unruly behaviour otherwise also associated with the early universities, not least the western suburb's Paris counterpart, the quartier latin to the south of the river This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Cambridge University Press in Law and History Review, available online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248017000372 It is not the copy of record. Copyright © 2017, Cambridge University Press.Hannes Kleineke and James Ross 2 Seine, was endemic. 2 Among the factors that made it so, the very existence of the established and to some extent tribal all-male societies of the Inns of Court and of Chancery, at close quarters with the royal law-courts and their heady mix of disputants and their hired legal counsellors in permanent competiton with each other, was of the first importance.Contemporaries were less than anxious to describe this state of affairs. In the day of London's earliest apologist, the twelfth-century cleric William FitzStephen, the western suburb had not yet become the home of the legal community, but even FitzStephen's fourteenth-century copyist, the London embroiderer Thomas Carleton, considered them insufficiently important to include them among his updates to the Description. 3 The fifteenth-century satyrical poem, the London Lickpenny, mercilessly mocked the venality of the men of law, and marked out Westminster Hall as a haunt of cutpurses, but otherwise had nothing to say about the district to the west of the city that housed the targets of the author's acerbic wit. 4 Nor did outsiders who visited London in the medieval period take much notice of the district through which they ...

Engendering Erudition: Masculinity and Legal Authority at England's Medieval Inns of Court

“…64 Chancery and Privy Council records show the need for such regulations, with evidence of Inn members being hauled up before the royal authorities for delinquencies including rioting, street fighting and house-breaking. 65 The Inns' registers document everything from pranks and mild infringements, for which the penalty was usually a small fine, to more serious offences for which members could be expelled. Lincoln's Inn had problems with younger members hunting rabbits in the Inn's gardens, pinching food from the kitchens or keeping other members awake with late-night carousing.…”