The barristers were the most powerful and prosperous professional group in early modern England. This book systematically examines the barrister's working life during a half-century of rapid growth and structural change within the legal profession. Prest analyzes patterns of professional recruitment, training, and mobility and explores the participation of barristers in the cultural, religious, and political life of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. This is the first book to be published in the Oxford Studies in Social History, under the general editorship of Keith Thomas. The series, which will cover all periods and parts of the world, will include original works of scholarship on a broad range of subjects of interest to historians as well as to scholars working in related fields.

The Tudor and Stuart inns of court were major centres of learning and literature, as well as professional associations of practising lawyers. This book sketches the evolution of the inns from their medieval origins and traces the dramatic impact of the societies' rapid expansion through the Elizabethan era and beyond. Prest's comprehensive study based on original sources surveys the structure and functions of the inns, outlining key aspects, from tensions between junior and senior members to the nature and effectiveness of their educational role. Its lively prose locates the inns within the cultural, political, religious, and social context of Shakespearean and pre-civil war England. This corrected and revised second edition of a classic work addresses recent scholarship on the early modern inns of court and includes a new chapter introducing the book to twenty-first-century readers.

This is a detailed study of the most powerful and prosperous professional group in early modern England. The half century before the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640 saw the bar undergo rapid growth and profound structural change. Wilfrid Prest's scholarly history examines the effects of these changes on the barrister's working life and explores the participation of barristers in the cultural, social, and political life of Elizabethan and early Stuart England.