‘ The inns of court man that never was studient’ argues that the contemporary stereotype of the idle and dissolute young inns of court gallant with more interest in playgoing than reading law reports, while doubtless exaggerated for moral and satirical effect, is corroborated by an abundance of biographical evidence.It also reflects two prime causes of student delinquency and disinclination for legal studies: lack of supervision and the intractability of the common law as a subject of study. ‘Guides to Method’ surveys the legal literature available to students, concluding that it offered little assistance to those attempting to navigate the law’s complexities. ‘Lay and Professional Legal Knowledge’ emphasises the gulf between the practising barrister’s expertise and the kinds of legal knowledge which most laymen were likely to need or possess.

Yet members acquired and exercised a remarkably wide range of non-legal accomplishments and skills. ‘Accomplishments and the Decline of Creativity’ argues that the inns did little to encourage such activities, especially after c.1615. ‘Varieties of Learning’ surveys the remarkably diverse intellectual life of the early modern inns, while the closing section ‘Achievements, Failures, Prescriptions’ evaluates their diverse roles as educational institutions, and the few contemporary proposals for their reform.

After an introductory excursus on the concept of the inns as early modern England’s third university, this chapter outlines the form of legal instruction which they provided by means of oral ‘learning exercises’, notably case-putting in moots and other exercises involving the argument of hypothetical cases in law,and ‘readings’ or lectures at both the inns of court and chancery.

The second section (‘The State of the Learning Exercises to 1640’) considers the supposed decline in the performance of exercises. It argues that even though they may have been rendered largely obsolete by the advent of the printed law-book, there is little to suggest that they were not generally performed in a conscientious and regular fashion before the outbreak of the civil war. But it was one thing to preserve the system as a going concern, quite another to revive it after the disruptions of the 1640s and ‘50s.

‘History and Historiography’ shows that the history of the inns of court has tended to be written from a foreshortened perspective, taking insufficient account of changes in the function and operation of the societies.‘Membership and Residence’ traces the impact of a massive expansion in student enrolments from the mid-sixteenth century, including the resultant shortage of on-site accommodation, while explaining why the nature of the surviving records and the inns’ own distinctive practices and requirements makes it impossible to precisely determine their size as residential institutions during this period. It concludes with a brief account of the changes in ‘Architecture and Topography’ consequent upon the inns’ membership expansion.

The first section of this chapter, ‘The Scope of Discipline’ traces the fashion in which the benchers initially sought to impose disciplinary constraints on members’ behaviour and demeanour. The growth of the inns after 1550 made it increasingly difficult to police the personal lives of junior members. But the benchers became more anxious to maintain and enhance their own authority, establishing sumptuary regulations on apparel, long hair and beards which emphasised the subordinate status of those below the bench, and sharply escalating measures against casual interpersonal violence within the societies.

They seem to have had some success in eliminating armed assaults, if not other forms of physical violence, while traditional violent behaviour outside the walls of the inns appears to have waned towards the end of our period.However, as ‘The Range of Defiance’ illustrates, collective defiance of and disobedience to the bench became a feature of life from the 1610s onwards, with sporadic outbreaks continuing until the end of the century and beyond, over sumptuary regulations, gambling at Christmas commons, and other issues.

The final section, ‘Authority and Revolt’ proposes that outbreaks of protest and rebellion in the latter half of our period were closely related to the major institutional changes examined in the preceding chapters.

Having examined the societies’ human dimensions, we may look more closely at their internal structure. As membership numbers grew, the intimacy of corporate life tended to weaken (‘From Clerks to Students’), while call to the bar, previously no more than an internal rank of membership, had become the necessary qualification for audience in the superior courts.‘The Rise of the Barristers’ and mounting pressure of numbers seeking call impelled the inns to prescribe formal qualifications, in terms of years of ‘continuance’ and participation in specified oral law-learning exercises. While non-academic factors, especially patronage and tenure of legal office, also played a part, use of the exercises to qualify for aa potentially lucrative legal career at the bar encouraged evasion or perfunctory performance. Meanwhile promotion to the governing bench of each society was no longer so intimately associated with the delivery of a ‘reading’ on a branch of statute law, and lawyer members who held major office under the crown or in the bureaucracy of the law courts were increasingly given automatic promotion as benchers or associates to the bench (‘From Readers to Benchers’).

As voluntary unincorporated societies, the inns hardly existed apart from their members. This chapter opens with a discussion (‘Motives and Status’) of reasons for the boom in admissions to membership from the mid-sixteenth century and the unsuccessful efforts to regulate and restrict that expansion. The following section (‘Income and Social Origins’) considers economic barriers to membership and the familial origins of those so admitted during the half-century before the Long Parliament, concluding that the inns’ students were generally recruited from a considerably higher social stratum than the student population of the two ancient universities. The chapter moves on to examine the ‘Regional Origins’ of inns of court entrants, showing that while they came from all over England, Wales and Ireland, each society had a distinctive regional recruitment pattern. At the same time, attendance at the inns did much to strengthen the national identity of the future governing elite, rather than merely reinforcing local divisions. A final section (‘Social Tensions and the Exodus of the Gentry’) points to tensions between young gentlemen students and the inns’ lawyer members, contributing to the gradual abandonment of the inns as finishing schools for the upper ranks of society after the civil wars.

The literary culture of early modern England was bilingual; literature of all kinds, including poetry which is the focus of this book, was read and written in both English and Latin throughout the whole of the period that we call Renaissance or early modern. Both the overlap and the lack of overlap between Latin and English poetry make a difference to our understanding of this literary culture. It matters that so many apparently innovative moves in English poetics – including the fashion for epyllia, epigrams and Cowley’s ‘irregular’ Pindaric odes – can be traced back to continental Latin poetry: that is, to ‘neo-’ Latin rather than primarily classical verse; it is also important that there are some forms – such as sonnets in English and (until Marvell’s First Anniversary) short panegyric epic in Latin – that were a characteristic feature of verse in one language but not the other. This introduction outlines the educational and literary context in which this poetic bilingualism emerged and developed, with a particular emphasis upon the cultural centrality of 'paraphrase' broadly understood.