the last instance of the immediate interference of the Privy Council with the arrangements of the Inns of Court respecting calls to the bar. In the reigns of James I. and Charles I., the judgés and benchers of the several Inns conjointly made orders on this subject, and, since the Commonwealth, the authority to call persons to the degree of barristerat-law has been tacitly relinquished to the benchers of the different societies, and is now considered to be delegated to them from the judges of the superior courts. In conformity with this view of the subject, the practice has been, in the several cases of a rejection of applications to be called to the bar which have lately happened, to appeal to the judges, who either confirm or reverse the decision of the benchers. Previously to a general arrangement made by all the Inns of Court in 1762, the qualifications required for being called to the bar varied extremely, and no uniform rule was observed at the different houses. In the first year of the reign of James I. it was solemnly ordered by a regulation signed by Sir Edward Coke, Sir Francis Bacon, and other distinguished names, that no person should be admitted into any of the Inns of Court who was not a gentleman by descent. Other regulations were occasionally made, as to the length of standing required, and the number of persons to be called at each time, which were often inconsistent with each other. The greatest inconvenience, however, arose from the absence of uniformity in the practice of the different Inns, as to the qualifications which they respectively required. To remedy this evil, it was determined, in 1762, by the concurrence of all the Inns of Court, to adopt a common set of rules for their guidance in this respect; and at the present day, the general rule as to qualification in all the Inns of Court is, that a person, in order to entitle himself to be called to the bar, must be twenty-one years of age, have kept twelve terms, and have been for five years, at the least, a member of the society. If he be a Master or Bachelor of Arts of either of the English universities, or of Trinity College, Dublin, it is sufficient if he has kept twelve terms and has | been three years a member of the Inn by which he desires to be called to the bar. By an order made by the benchers of the Inner Temple, in Trinity Term, 1829, every person proposed for admission to that house must, previously to his admission, undergo an examination by two barristers appointed by the bench, who are required to certify whether the individual is proficient in "classical attainments and the general subjects of a liberal education." This regulation has not been adopted at any of the other three Inns of Court. The expense of being called to the bar amounts to between 801. and 901., exclusive of the three years' commons and the admission fees. In order to qualify a person for the bar in Ireland, it is necessary that he should have kept eight terms at one of the four Inns of Court in London, and nine terms at the King's Inn in Dublin. [ADVOCATES, FACULTY OF; COUNSEL; INNS OF COURT.] The following statement of the regulations now in force as to the admission of advocates in the ecclesiastical and admiralty courts of Doctors' Commons, and in the provincial court of York, and the present number of advocates in these courts, is taken from a Parliamentary Return (No. 282, sess. 1844). According to the present rules, a candidate for admission as an advocate is required to deliver in to the office of the vicar-general of the province of Canterbury a certifi cate of his having taken the degree of Doctor of Laws, signed by the registrar of the university to which he belongs, A petition, praying that in consideration of such qualification the candidate may be admitted an advocate, is then presented to the archbishop, who issues his fiat for the admission of the applicant, directed to his vicar-general, who thereupon causes a rescript or commission to be prepared, addressed to the official principal of the Arches Court of Canterbury, empowering and requiring him to admit the candidate an advocate of that court. This commission contains a proviso that the person to be admitted shall not practise for one whole year from the date of his admission. The candidate is admitted on one of the regular sessions of the Arches Court; the rescript of the archbishop and to bring with him to the royal army a certain quota of men, corresponding in number to the extent and value of his lands; and, secondly, civil services, which were of various kinds, sometimes to perform certain offices in the king's household, to execute certain duties on the day of his coronation, to keep a certain number of horses, hounds, or hawks for the king's use, and the like. But, besides these honourable services, they were bound to personal attendance in the king's court when the king should please to summon them, and to do homage to him (homage from homo), to acknowledge themselves to be his homines, or barones, and to assist in the administration of justice, and in the transaction of other business which was done in the court of the king. earl of the Saxon times; and as these persons were raised above the other tenants in dignity, so were they, for the most part, distinguished by the greater extent of the lands held by them. Among those to whose names no mark of distinction is annexed, there was also great diversity in respect of the extent of territory granted to them. Some had lands far exceeding the extent of entire counties, while others had but a single parish or township, or, in the language introduced at the Conquest, but a single manor, or two adjacent manors, granted to them. All these persons, the earl included, were the barons, or formed the baronage of England. Whether the tenancy were large or small, they were all equally bound to render their service in his court We see in this the rude beginnings of when the king called upon them. The the modern parliaments, assemblies in diversity of the extent of the tenure afwhich the barons are so important a con- fords a plausible discriminatory circumstituent. But before we enter on that stance between two classes of persons who part of the subject, it is proper to observe, appear in early documents-the greater that among the great tenants of the crown and the lesser barons; but a better exthere was much diversity both of rank planation of this distinction may be given. and property. We shall pass over the In the larger tenancies, the persons who bishops and other ecclesiastics, only ob- held them granted out portions to be serving, that when it is said that the held of them by other parties upon the bishops have seats in parliament in virtue same terms on which they held of the of the baronies annexed to their sees, the king. As they had to furnish a quota of meaning of the expression is, that they men when the king called upon them, so sit there as any other lay homagers or they required their tenants to furnish men barons of the king, as being among the equipped for military service proportionpersons who held lands of the crown by ate to the extent of lands which they the services above mentioned; which is held when the king called upon them. correct as far as parliament is regarded As they had to perform civil services of as a court for the administration of jus- various kinds for the king, so they aptice, but doubtful so far as it is an assem-pointed certain services of the same kind bly of wise men to advise the king in matters touching the affairs of the realm. Amongst the other tenants we find some to whose names the word vicecomes is annexed. On this little has been said by the writers on English dignities, and it is doubtful whether it is used in Domesday' as an hereditary title, or only as a title of office answering to the present sheriff. But we find some who have indisputably a title, in the proper sense of the word, annexed to their names, and which we know to have descended to their posterity. These are the comites of 'Domesday-Book,' where, by the Latin word comes, they have represented the to be performed by their tenants to themselves. As they had to do homage from time to time to the king, and to attend in his court for the administration of justice and for other business touching the common interest, so they required the presence of their tenants to acknowledge their subjection and to assist in the adminis tration of that portion of public justice which the sovereign power allowed the great tenants to administer. The castles, the ruins of which exist in so many parts of the country, were the seats of these great tenants, where they held their courts, received the homage, and administered justice, and were to the sur rounding homagers what Westminster | that they were enabled to exhibit a miniaHall, a part of the court of the early ture representation of the state and court kings of England, was to the tenantry in of their chief: they affected to subinfeud; chief. The Earl of Chester is said to to have their tenants doing suit and have thus subinfeuded only eight persons service; and in point of fact, many of the in the vast extent of territory which the smaller manors at the present day are Conqueror granted to him. These had, ac- but tenures under the lesser barons, who cordingly, each very large tracts, and they held of the greater barons, who held of formed, with four superiors of religious the king. The process of subinfeudation houses, the court, or, as it is sometimes was checked by a wise statute of King called, the parliament of the Earls of Edward I., who introduced many salutary Chester. These persons are frequently reforms, passed in the eighteenth year of called the barons of that earldom; but the his reign, commonly called the statute number of persons thus subinfeuded was Quia Emptores, &c., which directed that usually greater, and the tenancies conse- all persons thus taking lands should hold quently smaller. They were, for the most them not of the person who granted them, part, persons of Norman origin, the per- but of the superior of whom the granter sonal attendants, it may be presumed, of himself held. the great tenant. There is no authentic register of them, as there is of the tenants in chief; but the names of many of them may be collected from the charters of their chief lords, to which they were, in most instances, the witnesses. These, it is presumed, constitute the class of persons who are meant by the Lesser Barons, when that term is used by writers who aim at precision. Many of these Lesser Barons, or Barons of the Barons, became the progenitors of families of pre-eminent rank and consequence in the country. For instance, the posterity of Nigellus, the Baron of Halton, one of the eight of the county of Chester, through the unexpected extinction of the male posterity of Ilbert de Laci, one of the greatest of the tenants in chief beneath the dignity of an earl, and whose castle of Pontefract, though in ruins, still shows the rank and importance of its early owners, became possessed of the great tenancy of the Lacis, assumed that name as the hereditary distinction, married an heiress of the Earls of Lincoln, and so acquired that Earldom; and when at length they ended in a female heiress, she was married to Thomas, son of Edmond, Earl of Lancaster, son of King Henry III. The ranks, indeed, of the tenants in chief, or greater barons, were replenished from the class of the lesser barons: as in the course of nature cases arose in which there was only female issue to inherit. But even their own tenancies were sometimes so extensive, The precise amount and precise nature of the services which the king had a right to require from his barons in his court, is a point on which there seems not to be very accurate notions in some of the writers who have treated on this subject; and a similar want of precision is discernible in the attempt at explaining how to the great court baron of the king were attracted the functions which belonged to the deliberative assembly of the Saxon kings, and the Commune Concilium of the realm, the existence of which is recognised in charters of some of the earliest Norman sovereigns. The fact, however, seems to be admitted by all who have attended to this subject, that the same persons who were bound to suit and service in the king's court constituted those assemblies which are called by the name of parliaments, so frequently mentioned by all our early chroniclers, in which there were deliberations on affairs touching the common interest, and where the power was vested of imposing levies of money to be applied to the public service. It is a subject of great regret to all who wish to see through what processes and changes the great institutions of the country have become what we now see them, that the number of public records which have descended to us from the first hundred and fifty years after the Conquest is so exceedingly small, and that those which remain afford so little information respecting this most interestiug point of inquiry. Hence it was long a maxim that nothing | but physical or natural impossibility, such as the continued absence of the husband beyond seas, &c., could prevent the child so born from being held legitimate, or justify an inquiry into the real paternity. Their liberality in the case of posthumous children was also remarkable: for in the case of the Countess of Gloucester, in the reign of Edward II., a child born one year and seven months after the death of the father, was pronounced legitimate; a degree of indulgence only exceeded by the complaisance of Mr. Serjeant Rolfe, in the reign of Henry VI., who was of opinion that a widow might give birth to a child at the distance of seven years after her husband's decease, without wrong to her reputation. (Coke upon Littleton, 123 b. note by Mr. Hargrave; Rolle's Abridgment, "Bastard;" and Le Marchant's Preface to the case of the Banbury Peerage.) The law now stands on a more reasonable footing, and the fact of birth during marriage, or within a competent time after the husband's death, is now held to be only a strong presumption of legiti- | macy, capable of being repelled by satisfactory evidence to the contrary. Another curious position of doubtful authority is also found in our old text writers; namely, that where a widow marries again so soon after her husband's decease that a child born afterwards may reasonably be supposed to be the child of either husband, then the child, upon attaining to years of discretion, shall be at liberty to choose which of the two shall be accounted his father. When a man dies, and his wife alleges that she is with child, those who may be entitled to the property in case there is no child born, or in case the child who is born is illegitimate, that is, not the child of the husband, may have a writ De Ventre Inspiciendo, the object of which is to ascertain if the woman is pregnant. [VENTRE INSPICIENDO, DE; WRIT.] The legal incapacities under which an illegitimate child labours by the law of England are few, and are chiefly confined to the cases of inheritance and succession. He is regarded for most purposes as the son of nobody, and is there fore heir-at-law to none of his reputed ancestors. He is entitled to no distributive share of the personal property of his parents, if they die intestate; and even under a will he can only take where he is distinctly pointed out in it as an object of the testator's bounty, and not under the general description of 'son,' 'daughter,' or child,' by which legitimate children alone are presumed to be designated. He can also take under a will before his birth, if he is particularly described. He may, however, acquire property himself, and thus become the founder of a fresh inheritance, though none of his lineal descendants can claim through him the property of his reputed relations. If he dies without wife, issue, or will, his lands and goods escheat to the crown, or lord of the fee. In the former event it is usual for the crown to resign its claim to the greater part of the property on the petition of some of his nearest quasi kindred. There is a clause (§ 11) in the new Savings Banks Act (7 & 8 Vict. c. 83) which allows the sum invested by a depositor, being illegitimate and dying intestate, to be paid to such person or persons as would be entitled to the same provided the depositor had been legiti mate. Strictly speaking, a bastard has no surname until he has acquired one by reputation, and in the meantime he is properly called by that of his mother. The mother of an illegitimate child is entitled to its custody, although if such child, within the age of nurture, be fraudulently taken from the mother by the putative father, the order of the justices to restore it to its mother is not sufficient. The remedy is by habeas corpus in the Court of King's Bench. Lord Stowell was of opinion that the father of an illegitimate child "had very little (if any) parental authority." (Phillimore's Burns, i. pp. 130-1.) Before the passing of 18 Eliz. c. 3, it is considered that the custody of an illegitimate child was in the hands of the parish, and after this enactment it was a question whether the father could take the child out of the possession of the parish. The first English statute which pro vides for the maintenance of illegitimate the forty-ninth of his reign, when the king was a prisoner in the hands of Simon de Montfort, who did what he pleased in the king's name. There are many such writs existing in the copies taken of them, of the reign of Edward I., and all subsequent kings, down to the present time. They are addressed to the archbishops and bishops, the prior of Saint John of Jerusalem, many abbots and priors, the earls and peers of the higher dignities as they were introduced into the peerage, and to a number of persons by their names only, as William de Vescy, Henry de Cobham, Ralph Fitzwilliam, William la Zouch, and the like-portions of the baronage whom the king chose to call to his councils. Upon this the question arises, whether when a person who was a baron by tenure received the king's writ to repair to the parliament, the receipt of the writ, and obedience to it, created in him a dignity as a lord of parliament which adhered to him during his life, and was transmitted to his heir. Upon this question the received opinion undoubtedly has been that a heritable dignity was created; that once a baron, by sitting under authority of the king's writ, always a baron; and that the barony would endure as long as there were heirs of the body of the person to whom the king's writ had issued. Upon this, the received opinion, there have been many adjudications of claims to dignities, and yet the Lords' Committee on this subject express very strong doubts respecting the doctrine, and contend that there are persons to whom the king's writ issued, and who took their seat accordingly, to whose heirs similar writs never went forth, though there was no bar from nonage, fatuity, or attainder. On the other hand, there is the strong fact, that we do find by the writs of summons, that they were addressed to the several members of many of the great families of England, as they rose in successive generations to be the heads of their houses: that, when it happened that a female heiress occurred, her issue was not unfrequently set in the place in parliament which her ancestors had occupied; and that when the new mode arose in the time of Richard II., of ereating barons by patent, in which a right was acknowledged in the posterity of the person so created, the ancient barons who had sat by virtue of the king's writ to them and their ancestors did not apply for any ratification of their dignity by patent, which they would have done had they not conceived that it was a heritable dignity, as secure as that granted by the king's patent. The doubt of the Lords' Committees, however, shows that this is one of the many points touching the baron on which there is room for question. The practice, however, has been hitherto to admit that proof of the issuing of the writ, and of obedience to it, by taking a seat in parliament, or what is technically called proof of sitting, entitles the person who is heir of the body of a person so summoned to take his seat in parliament in the place which his ancestor occupied. Nevertheless, it would seem, from the report of the Lords' Committees, that in cases in which one person only of a family has been summoned at some remote period, and none of his known posterity near his time, this was no creation of the dignity of a baron, or of a peer in parliament, which could be claimed at this distance of time by any person, however clearly he might show himself to be the heir of the body of the person so summoned. But that, in cases in which the writ and the sitting can be proved respecting several persons in succession in the same line, as in Mauley, Roos, Furnival, Clifford, and many other families, there is an heritable dignity created, liable to no defeazance, and that this dignity may be claimed by any person who at this day can show himself to be the heir of the body of the person to whom the original writ issued. In interpreting the phrase heir of the body, the analogy of the descent of the corporeal hereditaments in the feudal times is followed. That is, if a person die seised of the dignity of baron, and leave a brother and an only child, a daughter, the daughter shall inherit in preference to the brother, though the dignity has been transmitted from some person who is ancestor to them both. This fact clearly shows how close a connexion there is between the dignity and |