ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the incomes and wealth of barristers, their investments in land and securities and their involvement in the world of business. In the early 1850s young Fitzjames Stephen was considering which of the three learned professions, divinity, law or physic, was most suitable for him. The landed members of the nineteenth-century bar can be divided into two main sub-groups: those whose principal occupation and source of income was landowning, and those for whom it was only a secondary concern. The nineteenth century witnessed a significant decline in the connection between the upper branch of the legal profession and landed society. Most nineteenth-century barrister/landowners were men who had inherited land, and the earlier propensity of successful advocates to purchase land as a means of founding a family or for investment purposes virtually disappeared. Scholars have often portrayed the professional man and the businessman as two distinct species with diametrically opposed motivations and goals.
