ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the bar and bench in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to test the validity of commonplace assumptions about the chronology and progress of professionalisation in England. It first presents a brief account of the orthodox interpretation of the rise of professionalism. In most theories of professionalisation, the development of esoteric knowledge and its diffusion among practitioners by means of formal and systematic education constitutes a crucial stage. According to the traditional interpretation, improvements in professional education and consequent increases in status, cohesion and independence depended on the establishment in the nineteenth century of the modern qualifying association. Moreover, while there can be little doubt that the social transformation of nineteenth-century England helped to speed up the evolution of the professions, the case of the bar suggests that it is incorrect to see the industrial revolution as a watershed in their history.
