The Mysterious Lawyer: The Tomb Effigy of an Unidentified Man of Law at Deddington

Summary

SUMMARY

In a wall recess in the south aisle of Deddington church is the tomb effigy of an unidentified lawyer, shown wearing a coif, and datable on stylistic grounds to c.1330. No antiquarian evidence survives to indicate who the person commemorated might be and, although the name of Ralph de Bereford has sometimes been suggested, the case for associating him with the tomb has remained unproven. On the evidence of a parliamentary subsidy return of 1316, it is suggested that the man commemorated is indeed Ralph de Bereford and that the origins of his tenurial connection with Deddington are to be found in his ties with the elder Hugh Despenser, who acquired the lordship of one of the manors in the town.

Among the tomb monuments to have come down to us from the Middle Ages an especially interesting series is that commemorating the professional lawyers, an élite group who came to the fore in the second half of the thirteenth century. Earlier, in the reigns of Henry II and his immediate successors, the king’s justices had been recruited principally from the baronage, the knightly administrators and the ranks of the senior clergy. These men were often amateurs who gained their know-how in the course of their everyday work. As the body of law increased, however, and as the nature of that law became more technical, so it became necessary for justices to be recruited who were specialists in their field: men who had received a training in the law, who had worked full-time in the law, and who kept up-to-date in their understanding of the law. It was as a result of this ever-gathering process of specialisation that part-time, largely amateur justices gave way in the thirteenth century to trained and qualified professionals. Among the earliest and most distinguished of these men were Gilbert de Thornton, who became chief justice of king’s bench in 1290, and William de Bereford, who was appointed to the equivalent position in common pleas in 1309. At the same time, by a parallel process, a class of professional pleaders was brought into existence by the need to have practitioners who could act as intermediaries between litigants and the justices, advising the former on legal procedures, representing them in court and arguing on their behalf.