AALT Homepage             Attorneys in Early Modern England and Wales

Main Map Index           Full Attorney List, 1607

Attorneys in Early Modern England and Wales Robert C. Palmer, Cullen Professor of History and Law, The University of Houston

The plea rolls allow detailed work both in the number of lawyers who worked as attorneys in the court of common pleas and in the definition of the area in which they took clients. The information facilitates assessment of this branch of the legal profession, the functioning of both the central courts and local courts (in which these lawyers also worked), and social and local history. At this point detailed information is available for both 1563 and 1607 and less detailed information at points in between those two dates. This page makes available a conference paper contrasting this analysis with the analysis of Christopher Brooks in his book Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth, a full listing of lawyers who worked as attorneys in the court of common pleas in 1607, and maps of their minimum catchment areas. The conference at which the paper was delivered was the annual convention of the American Society for Legal History at Baltimore, November 2006. The full listing of attorneys indicates that there were at least 1,079 lawyers who could bring actions as attorneys in the court of common pleas at the point in time of Trinity term 1607. The figure includes attorneys who submitted attorney warrants in that term as well as attorneys who submitted such warrants both before and after that term. Attorneys who submitted warrants only either soon before or soon after the term are listed but not included in the count. The information for 1563 is not yet tabulated, but will be posted as soon as possible, probably before the summer of 2007. For both 1563 and 1607 a substantial number of lawyers submitted warrants from multiple counties and thus could not be identified predominately with a single county (entered as "various") or handled no defendants and thus could not be identified with county or region at all ("unknown"). The maps showing catchment areas of attorneys indicate only minimum catchment areas. In 1607 only defendants had their parish of residence specified. Thus definition of an attorney's catchment area can only be based on the clients who were defendants in actions. Clients who were plaintiffs probably came from roughly the same area, but were in greater numbers, since many defendants settled with the plaintiff prior to retaining lawyers in the case. The catchment area definition includes information from 1607 to 1609. The material for 1563 is somewhat different, in that at that time plaintiffs were often identified also by parish of residence. The maps demonstrate, among other things, the difficulty of assigning attorneys to individual counties (since most took clients from more than one). The degree to which all areas of the country were served by multiple attorneys, who also often spent term-time in the inns in London, suggests strongly that attorneys were a major means by which information, social and political, was gathered and disseminated.