ABSTRACT
This essay is in honor of Paul Brand as our pre-eminent historian of the earliest centuries of the English legal profession. Canon lawyers in the thirteenth century and afterward wrote a great deal about their obligation to provide advocacy to widows, orphans, and the poor free of charge. In the king’s courts of common law, however, the evidence is far less abundant and far more equivocal. Historians of the early English legal profession, including Brand, have credited common lawyers with recognizing a similar obligation to donate their legal services for the poor. Literary sources, on the other hand, regularly condemned these medieval lawyers for refusing to say a syllable unless they were well paid. This paper examines the Year Book evidence for a professional obligation to plead for the poor before such an obligation was formalized in the 1490s by a statute for in forma pauperis proceedings and by establishment of a Court of Requests. Early fourteenth-century judges refused to waive pleading formalities for poor litigants, while late fourteenth-century judges were more disposed to do so. Fifteenth-century judges assigned counsel to poor litigants. Further insight is gained from the evidence that customary level of payment for lawyers’ services in these centuries by clients who could afford them was on a low-fee/high-volume basis. Finally, lawyers’ love of argument for its own sake, their sense of fairness, and their concern for reputation may have added to their incentives to serve the poor without charge.
