The first proto-professional lawyers active in the English common-law courts can be identified in the early thirteenth century and the first fully professional during the reign of Henry III (1216–72), but it is only in the reign of Edward I (1272–1307) that professional lawyers emerge fully into the light of day and enough evidence survives to allow us to talk of the existence of an English ‘legal profession’. That profession was divided from the beginning into two separate groups: serjeants, who were professional specialists in pleading in court for their clients, and attorneys, who were professional specialists in making appearances in court on behalf of clients and in briefing serjeants. The centre of the emerging legal profession was the Common Bench, the main central royal court for civil litigation, which was normally resident at Westminster. There were around thirty serjeants practising there in years around 1300 and they are also known to have practised in other royal courts. There were also over two hundred professional attorneys practising in the court in 1300 and smaller groups in other royal courts. Other serjeants are to be found in each county court and in the courts of the city of London and in other towns (Brand 1992b). In the 1270s serjeants began to be appointed as royal justices but they did not gain a monopoly of judicial appointments to the main royal courts until the 1340s (Brand 1992a: 157–67). Even before that merger had taken place, and while the judiciary was still a rather more heterogenous body, the two groups (of professional lawyers and professional royal justices) which had long been in close contact with each other formed a single ‘professional community’ for socio-linguistic purposes. Also members of that community were the clerks of the royal courts, the most senior members of which themselves played a significant part in the judicial process, not only through authorising process but also in actual adjudication, as well as compiling the official record of litigation. By 1307 it is known that there were as many as forty-three different clerks writing the main plea roll of the court (Brand 1992a: 169–201).