RICHARD CARRE was articled to Thomas Wright and Francis Sitwell, attorneys at Sheffield in the early part of the eighteenth century. His Day Book, which is preserved at Sheffield, gives a detailed picture of his life as an articled clerk in the period 1724-30. It begins appropriately enough on 2 December 1724, ‘Engrossed a deed’, for this seems to have been one of his principal occupations, together with that of attending his master on his business journeys, especially to hold manorial courts, and to enter indentures of apprenticeship at the Hall of the Cutlers' Company in Sheffield. At sessions time he went with him to Doncaster, York, Rotherham, and Chesterfield. He was sent to Wakefield to buy stamps, he issued subpoenas, collected rents, and when there was no work of this kind to be done, he occupied his time in copying out precedents, or reading from such current legal manuals as Giles Jacob's Common Law Common Plac'd.

Carre's masters seem to have taken the task of training him very seriously. The main purpose of the Day Books seems to have been to act as a sort of check on his activities, and may perhaps have served as documentary evidence of his diligence—or lack of it— during his clerkship, and have been produced for the inspection of the judges when he was seeking admission. This at least seems to be the meaning of the various marginal comments added in a hand different from that of the main body of the text, and which is presumably that of the master.

On 31 January 1726/7, the clerk notes, ‘12 sheets of Bradesford's answer—Bradesford had not the skin till almost noon’. Beneath this is written in a different hand, ‘ This is the engrossment of the answer and is 39 lines of the skin and is but 10 sheets of the draft and 2 lines though here it is said 12, these sheets are very wide and there happens to be a sheet or more of the 10 struck out, but however all this should have been done in less than two hours and better done than it is done’.