Conclusion
Changes in the law and governance after the Black Death cannot be related in any significant degree to the disappearance of the grass-roots legal experience of attorney lawyers. Enough survived and continued in the profession both to handle the actual volume of litigation and to acculturate new lawyers, many of whom had probably already been in training or had prior experience at Westminster in years past.
To the extent that the size of the lower branch of the legal profession made a difference, it is conceivable that the smaller size of that branch of the profession (a group of 441 attorneys, but counted over six terms in 1350-1instead of the three/four terms of 1348) would make lawyers more manageable: the group was only 56% as large as the 1348 cohort. As yet, however, no evidence indicates that those lawyers had to be managed. Until such evidence emerges, even the smaller size of the lower branch of the legal profession would seem irrelevant to the post-Black Death changes in law and governance.
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