that they
should be entered or recorded in Latin. The deeds were drawn in the same
language; the laws were composed in that idiom, and no other tongue was
used at court. It became, says Hume, the language of all fashionable
company; and the English themselves ashamed of their own country,
affected to excel in that foreign dialect. At Athens, and even in France
and England, formal and prepared pleadings were prohibited, and it was
unlawful to amuse the court with long, artful harangues; only it was the
settled custom here, in important matters, to begin the pleadings with a
text out of the holy scriptures. It is of late years that eloquence was
admitted to the bar.

The account which the learned judge Hale gives of the lawyers, who
pleaded in the 15th century, does them little honour. He condemns the
reports during the reigns of Henry IV. and V. as inferior to those of
the last twelve years of Edward III. and he speaks but coolly of those
which the reign of Henry VI. produces. Yet this deficiency of
progressive improvement in the common law arose not from a want of
application to the science; since we learn from Fortescue that there
were no fewer than two thousand students attending on the inns of
chancery and of court, in the time of its writer. Gray's-inn, in the
time of Henry VIII. was so incommodious, that "the ancients of this
house were necessitated to lodge double." Indeed until the beginning of
the last century the lawyers lived mostly in their inns of court, or
about Westminster-hall. But a great change has been effected; they are
all now removed to higher ground, squares and genteel neighbourhoods, no
matter how far distant from their chambers.

The number of judges in the courts of Westminster was by no means
certain. Under Henry VI. there were at one time eight judges in the
court of common pleas. Each judge took a solemn oath that "he would take
no fee, pension, gift, reward, or bribe, from any suitor, saving meat
and drink, which should be of no great value." In 1402, the salary of
the chief justice of the king's bench was forty pounds per annum. In
1408, the chief justice of the common pleas had fifty-five marks per
annum. In 1549, the chief justice of the king's bench had an addition of
thirty pounds to his salary, and each justice of the same bench and
common pleas, twenty pounds. At this time, a felony under the value of
twelve pence, was not a capital offence; and twelve pence then was equal
to sixt