bred more decisions, which by the early nineteenth century were increasingly reported in print, rather than being left in manuscript circulation. The rise in litigation was matched by an expansion in the number of treatises being published, whose function was largely to digest the case law coming out of the courts, and summarize it for practitioners. The mid-century also saw a flourishing of legal periodicals, aimed at a nationwide audience of solicitors as well as barristers.36 Secondly, the market for legal information expanded with the institutional reforms of the mid-century.The size of the legal profession grew in the nineteenth century. In the decade before the passing of the County Courts Act in 1846, the number of barristers grew from1300 to over 2300.37The number of solicitors also rose significantly, growing at 3% per annum in the first third of the century.38 With the coming of the county courts, a new phalanx of sixty judges was appointed to administer small claims.39 Just as the growing number of barristers and solicitors acquired their information from the new print culture, so these judges,who were not rubbing shoulders on a daily basis with the superior court judges, needed manuals to help digest the growing quantity of reported case law.Thirdly, procedural reforms in the common law and equity in the mid-nineteenth century took away many of the old pleading structures which had formed organizational categories, requiring new principled approaches which could be found in texts.40 For much of this period - and certainly until the mid-century procedural reforms called for something more learned - treatises were not sophisticated works analyzing principle in a comparative way.Treatises were not written by men of great age and learning, but by young men seeking to make money in the hard early years of practice.41Take the case of Edward Sugden: his first important work, on Vendors and m i cha e l lob ban 145 36 On periodicals, see D. Ibbetson, ‘Legal Periodicals in England 1820-70,’ Zeitschrift füf Neuere Rechtsgeschichte 28 (2006), p. 175; S.Vogenauer, ‘Law Journals in Nineteenth-Century England’, Edinburgh Law Review12 (2008), pp. 26-50 37 Cocks, Foundations, p. 88. 38 See R. L. Abel,The Legal Profession in England AndWales (Oxford, 1988), pp. 164, 410-12. 39 P. Polden, A History of the County Court, 1846-1971 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 240. 40 For the procedure of the superior courts of common law and their reform, see Cornish et al, Oxford History, vol. XI, pp. 569-645. 41 On legal treatises, see A.W. B. Simpson, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Legal Treatise: Legal Principles and the Form of Legal Literature,’ in his Legal Theory and Legal History: Essays on the Common Law(London, 1987), pp. 273-320.
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