3 - Letters of Appointment and Routine Business

Summary

The age of legal professionalization in England was an age of written records, the numbers of which are astounding. Rolls from the courts of the itinerant justices from one century alone, the thirteenth, fill 27,500 membranes. From the testimony of witnesses to the debates of the serjeants at law, legal activities were documented as never before. Nevertheless, it remained possible throughout the period for a client to hire a professional lawyer without drawing up a contract to do so. Courts as well as individuals used parole or verbal agreements to engage the services of lawyers for clients. The central courts of the Crown had their own licensed practitioners who might be appointed for routine matters and even the elite serjeant at law could be approached in the halls of Westminster and hired for consultation on the spot. Lawyers who represented clients in the ecclesiastical courts were likewise retained by verbal agreements which the Church used moral constraints to enforce. Contractual agreements apud acta, whereby a proctor was appointed for a litigant in front of the judge, were common methods by which clients retained advocates and proctors.