David Sugarman 242 The ideal of the “great man” was fortified by an attachment to mere technical and practical accomplishment, as opposed to the demands of philosophical or juristic speculation represented by writers such as Austin, Maine and Dicey. The tension between the former and the latter did not yield to the demands of speculation and theory.The history of the bar in the nineteenth century is that of a profession dragged with only a modicumof kicking and a little muted screaming into the twentieth century. The bar of 1900 remained in much the same condition as a century earlier; and that, given the close relation between bench and bar, tells us much about the British judicial temperament. In short, the bar has been pre-eminently successful in thwarting the efforts of those who have sought to “modernise” it (in the Weberian sense). The bar and its culture straddled the culture of the landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie - though it was closer to the former. Many of the core notions that defined what it was to be a barrister derived fromthe culture of the landed. The bar tenaciously clung to the gentlemanly character of the profession - that the barrister should be of a sufficiently elite social background as not to have to worry about fees. This influenced its attitude to examinations and other educational requirements.Thiswas sustained, in part, but the close association that had developed since the times of the Tudor’s, between the Inns of Court and the academic education of England’s nobility and gentry. As regards solicitors, there are several aspects of their relations with others which strike one as pre-modern. There is the almost feudal relationship between solicitors and their clients. Solicitors understood the deference expected of them. This both reflected and sustained one of the special features of the English legal professions - its peculiarly private face. Privacy was the price paid for the detailed knowledge that they guarded. It was essential if, as was often the case, the solicitor was to retain the business of the same family over several generations.The dynastic ambitions of the attorney were not, it seems, altogether different fromthose of their landed clients.This was por106 5ee Cocks, op. cit., Part III; Sugarman. “Legal Theory, the Common Law Mind and the Making of the Text-Book Tradition”, op cit pp. 33-54. See Duman, op. cit., chaps. 2 and 3; Cocks, op. cit., chap. 8. los Por useful illustrations of this point, see V. Belcher, Boodle Hadfield and Co (London: Boodle. Hatfield and Co., 1985), (on the close and long-standing connections between one London’s oldest firms of solicitors and rich landowners, notably, the Grosvenors, the Berkeleys and the Sackvilles); and J. Slinn, A History of Freshfields, (London: Freshfields, 1984), illuminating the long- established relations betw'een Freshfields and the City of London. For instance, the firm has acted for the Bank of England since 1743). For example, solicitors clung to the original family name of their firms, despite breaks in the direct family line: see Belcher, op. cit., pp. 89 and 142. Thus, the messages transmitted by the form of legal practice - like so much of the culture of the common law - were those of stability, reassuranee, of an unchanging and old-world character. Cf. The analogous practice of “fictive kin” - the fiction of no break in the family succession - adopted by members of the landed classes: see. L and J. C. Stone, An Open Elite?: England 1540-1880, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 103-15. 107 of 109
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