Among the minorities which have decisively influenced the civilisation of Western Europe, few have been more important–and none more persistent–than the lawyers. In Roman law, Justinian–in canon law, Gratian– in international law, Grotius–these are authorities who belong not simply to the history of European law, but to the wider history of Europe. In England, Glanvill and Bracton, Littleton and Coke profoundly affected not merely the development of the common law, but the development of English society as well.

Yet the influence of the lawyers has not been limited to the making of law. Because of the training which he received, the lawyer has been entrusted with a great deal of work which can only loosely be described as ‘legal’, and these ‘extra-curricular’ activities–both public and private–have given the profession an importance which its size and its strictly forensic activities did not warrant. In England, moreover, the lawyers have had a further significance. Never isolated from the rest of the community, as in some continental countries, disposing of the wealth, advancement and prestige which their skill won for them, they have been a catalyst in society, agents of social change.

In England, the influence of the legal profession was, in each of these ways, at its zenith between the middle of the fifteenth and the middle of the sixteenth centuries. These were the years during which the institutions of the English common law withstood the threat of the new legal machinery of the council and the prerogative courts, and years which saw the start of a legal reformation which shaped the law for centuries to come.