ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with financial administration we saw that the English kings in the late Middle Ages became increasingly inclined to employ lawyers in administrative posts. Itinerant justices might visit the shires to hold the assizes, and from the early fourteenth century it had been provided that they were to be discreet men who were knowledgeable in law. The increasing complexity and technicality of the law necessitated a professional expertise among its practitioners. The most striking idiosyncrasy of the common law was the continued use of French in its formal business, despite a statute of 1362 which had ordered that pleas should be heard in English and enrolled in Latin. Law French, however, possessed greater technical precision in its terminology, which obviously commended it to lawyers. By such opposition to arbitrary royal power, the common lawyers must rank high among the architects of the later British State.
