Book Review

This volume is a welcome addition to Hambledon's fine series of collected essays by leading legal historians. Dr. Christopher Brooks, perhaps best known for his Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth (Cambridge 1986), is an expert on the history of the English legal profession and in particular its lower branch, consisting of attorneys and solicitors. In the eight essays collected here, Brooks examines the profession's history and its effect on English society, primarily but not exclusively during the early modern period.	1
Four of the eight essays have previously appeared elsewhere, although it is a pleasure to have them in this collection. "Litigants and Attorneys in the King's Bench and Common Pleas, 1560–1640" was published in J. H. Baker, ed., Legal Records and the Historian (London, 1978); "Interpersonal Conflict and Social Tension: Civil Litigation in England, 1640–1830" was included in A. L. Beier et al., eds., The First Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989); "The Place of Magna Carta and the 'Ancient Constitution' in Sixteenth-Century English Legal Thought" appeared in E. Sandoz, ed., The Roots of Liberty (Columbia, Mo., 1993); and "Professions, Ideology, and the 'Middling Sort of People,' 1550– 1650" was published in J. Barry and C. W. Brooks, eds., The Middling Sort of People (New York, 1994).	2
This review will concentrate on the four essays making their first appearance here. The longest and most wide-ranging of these is "Litigation and Society in England, 1200–1996." Marshaling an impressive array of statistics, yet cognizant of its limitations, Brooks examines in this essay the fluctuations in civil litigation and court usage between the early thirteenth century and the mid-1990s and how these fluctuations affected the number of lawyers. He identifies five waves of rising litigation, each of which was accompanied by growth in the legal profession: roughly speaking, 1250–1331, 1349–1395, 1500–1640, 1750–1880, and 1950–1992 (65–69). On the "age-old conundrum" of whether lawyers create lawsuits or vice versa, legal historians who are also lawyers will be relieved to learn that, at least in the Tudor-Stuart period where the data are sufficient to make an informed judgment, "the surge in litigation came first" (84).	3
Of the remaining three essays, two focus on the contraction of the legal profession in the late seventeenth century and its subsequent expansion beginning nearly a century later. "The Decline and Rise of the English Legal Profession, 1700–1850" explores the consequences of the drop in litigation between 1640 and 1750 and the decline in importance of the inns of court and inns of chancery in the years after the Civil War. As Brooks argues persuasively, less litigation and weakened inns led to a decrease in the number of lawyers and to a period of deprofessionalization. His account concentrates on the lower branch of the profession, which responded by creating substitutes for the inns of chancery in the form of voluntary associations serving social and educational functions (134). Prominent among these was the Society of Gentlemen Practicers, formed in 1737, the predecessor of the modern Law Society (134). Brooks concludes the essay by tracing the birth of the Law Society and its gradual transformation into the gatekeeper of the profession's lower branch (141–42). "Apprenticeship and Legal Training in London, 1700–1850" examines the forms of legal education in the wake of the inns' decline. Some students studied on their own or formed "evening societies" to train in groups (151), but the predominant form of education was the apprenticeship (150). Little information survives about apprenticeships in the upper branch, but for the lower branch there are extensive records thanks to the 1729 Attorney Act, which required would-be attorneys to produce written evidence of their clerkships. With respect to the subjects studied, these records show a high degree of consistency over time. They also show, interestingly, that there was an "unmistakeable progression" in the eighteenth century from having apprentices domiciled in the master's house to having them live in separate accommodation (122). (Why? Unfortunately, Brooks does not say, other than to suggest that a similar pattern appeared in other occupations.) Despite periodic concerns about the quality of apprenticeship, Brooks demonstrates that it remained the standard method of legal education throughout the period of this essay, only later giving way to university training.	4
The final new essay, "Law, Lawyers and the Social History of England, 1500–1800," offers a two-pronged criticism of the current state of premodern social history. First, the essay calls on social historians to stop focusing so heavily on the records of criminal cases. As Brooks accurately points out, the surviving accounts of civil litigation also contain a gold mine of information about social and economic relationships (188–89). Second, the essay chastises certain historians for assuming that "the law" in earlier centuries automatically represented the values of the elite. Instead, as Brooks rightly argues, historians should realize that many of the participants in legal proceedings, and in particular the lawyers and litigants, were predominantly neither rich nor poor but rather "the middling sort" (187).	5
Taken together, these essays make an important contribution to the history of the English legal profession, and especially its lower branch, in an era that was once correctly called a dark age in English legal history. Thanks to Brooks's research, the history of attorneys and solicitors, and of their role in early modern English society, has been greatly illumined.	6
T. P. Gallanis Ohio State University

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