Serjeants-at-law and apprentices in prerevolutionaty England

The article aims at describing the two upper orders of advocates in the Pre-Revolutionary England: sergeants-at-law and apprentices. The following tasks are set to achieve this goal: to demonstrate the historical evolution of sergeants-at-law and apprentices as special orders; to define the place of sergeants-at-law and apprentices in the body of lawyers; to depict the professional and social status of sergeants-at-law and apprentices; to reveal the incomes of pleading practices of upper branch lawyers; to consider the representative and ceremonial practices used by orders of lawyers of upper branch. The author used the cultural anthropology approach that implies a presentation of generalized knowledge about a given historical cultural phenomena; in this case, the formalized order of lawyers - sergeants-at-law bound by steady socio-cultural and professional ties, lifestyle, commonly lived in Sergeant inns; and apprentices at law that were members of a larger and more complicated inns of court where apprentices constituted an influential and reputable group. The problematic field of the research is that to present day the essential socio-cultural and professional characteristics of advocacy communities have not been clarified, ceremonial and presentation practices have not been described. The sources for the research became the treatises of English lawyers and antiquaries (John Fortescue, Thomas Wilson, Edward Coke, John Stow, William Dugdale, James Whitlock) that recorded particular characteristics the sergeants-at-law and apprentices. After the research, the author came to the following conclusions: in the sixteenth and the first part of the seventeenth centuries, sergeants-at-law and apprentices constituted the so-called "upper branch" of English lawyers. Both orders emerged in the thirteenth century, as bodies of pleaders in the High Courts of the English common law. Sergeants, united in a special fraternity, were an elite body of advocates, distinguished by their wealth, connected by corporative solidarity, having the good and sustained ties with the royal court and structures of the government. The unity of order and its status were supported by an elaborate centuries-old ceremonies, rituals, and special garments. The sources prove that the way to a sergeant degree was slow and long and took at least fifteenth years. In the thirteenth century apprentices were simply sergeants' pupils. However, in the Tudor and early Stuart England sergeants were chosen from those who had been admitted twice to public readings in the inns of court and who had practiced as apprentices. By that time, apprentices became rightful lawyers practicing in royal courts.

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