The legal profession was a significant element in late-medieval English society, both by reason of its intellectual contribution to the development of England's characteristic institutions and traditions and by reason of the opportunities which it provided for the gifted individual to rise and prosper. Yet, given its importance, it has not received anything like its fair share of attention from historians. Among the reasons for this neglect the most obvious are the dearth of internal professional records and the forbidding vastness of the public and private archives from which less accessible information may be pieced together. Work on the latter is beginning to show that lawyers at all levels left more traces in the records than has been supposed. With a combination of local and central records, such as wills and subsidy rolls, the accounts of civic, noble and ecclesiastical clients, and above all the records of courts, it would be possible to produce thumbnail sketches of thousands of lawyers in the late-medieval period and to place each man in a social category. The labour would be immense, but not technically difficult, given a list of names to work with and perhaps a computer to help with the sorting and indexing. Since that has not yet been done, it is possible here to attempt no more than a preliminary sketch of the profession, with a view to solving some of the initial difficulties inherent in producing the working list of names.