It is rather surprising that no one has yet written a history of the English Bar in its modern form. Although much valuable work has been done on the history of the legal profession, particularly in its earlier stages, and although the history of attorneys and solicitors has been written, little is known about the development of barristers as a branch of the profession and their relations with the other branches. The present article can hardly supply this deficiency, which is a very large one, but it may lay open some aspects of the subject in the hope that more research will follow.

There has been a divided legal profession in this country, as in the old Civil law systems, ever since there has been a ‘profession’. Indeed the distinction between attorney and pleader is older than the profession itself, and an effort must be made to avoid confusing the name of a function with the name of the profession which later came to enjoy its sole exercise. In the absence of a professional organisation, anyone might perform the functions of attorney or pleader, for reward or otherwise, and therefore anyone might combine the functions. The fact that the same man might have been an attorney one day and a pleader the next does not mean that there was no clear distinction between the two characters, but that there was no organisation which could enforce a monopoly.