Law Courts	233
land and placed near the courts at Westminster, with the
evident intention of having them trained for service in
those courts. The origin and early history of the Inns of
Court are not known in detail, but here was the situation
out of which they grew. A common law was recognised;
some sense of its national character was dawning, of its
distinction from Roman or canon law; it was in the hands
of laymen and it could not be taken for granted that these
men had received any training, legal or other, at the uni-
versities—as a matter of fact, they got their knowledge of
the law and entered its higher service through training in
its courts. And these courts were at Westminster; this
was the home of the common law, not Oxford or Cam-
bridge. Young men looking to a legal career gathered in
the vicinity, and the four great law schools were bom:
Lincoln's Inn, the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, and
Gray's Inn. It is not the place here to say anything of
the organisation or work of these schools. But their
character was unique; in origin essentially fraternities of
lawyers, and always remaining such, they undertook the
training of students* worked out a system of instruction,
government, and discipline of their own, had their own
preparatory schools, and conferred "what in effect were
degrees, and degrees which admitted to practice in the
courts."1
The importance of the law schools in this connection
was their influence in making the common law enduring.
They were thus largely responsible for that law's share in
England's governmental destiny. This achievement is
summed up in Maitland's saying that "taught law is
tough law." It would
1 Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance, note 60; see this note also
for literature upon the subject. "What Is distinctive of medieval Eng-
land is not parliament, for we may everywhere see assemblies of estates, not
trial by jury, for this was but slowly suppressed in France. But the Inns
of Court and the Year Books that were read therein, we shall hardly find
their like elsewhere."—Ibid., p. 27. "They were associations of lawyers
which had about them a good deal of the club, something of the college
something of the trade-union.**—Maitland and Montague* Sketch of
English Legal History', p. no,