Augustus directed the passage of
another law forbidding compensation to orators and advocates, but it was
disregarded and subsequent emperors contented themselves with fixing
limits for the fees to be charged. In the golden age of the Roman law,
therefore, the payment of the profession became recognized as legitimate
and the profession itself became a definite body with clearly understood
functions.
In England, for two hundred years after the Conquest, the priests were
the only learned men, and they, too, like the Scribes, acted as judges
and advisers of litigants. Even as late as the time of Henry VIII, as we
know, the Keeper of the King's Conscience and the head of the Court of
Equity, was an Ecclesiastic in the formidable person of Cardinal
Woolsey. About the reign of King John, laymen became lawyers, and in
Henry III's time the Pope forbade priests to fit themselves in civil law
or to act as advisers in respect to it. We may properly say that the
profession of the Bar, as a recognized English institution, had its
beginnings in the struggle for individual rights by which the English
race forced the great charter from King John.
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