An overview of the organization of the British legal profession, courts of law, and the processes required to become a barrister or solicitor.

Chapter 3 analyzes freedom as doing “whatever one wishes” in fourth-century oratory. As several scholars have noted, doing “whatever one wishes” appears ambivalent in forensic speeches. They argue that, since Athens was not an anarchic state, extreme freedom could be glossed as a threat to sociopolitical stability. In contrast to prevailing scholarship, however, I argue that the most dominant principle, even in these texts, is the preservation of positive freedom as justification for the litigant’s position. While acting “however one wishes” may be presented as objectionable, the rhetoric of that assessment emphasizes who is doing “whatever they wish” and whom they affect by doing so. Bad characters, whether a criminals, oligarchs, or metics, can be rebuked as undeserving of positive freedom and abusing the power that attends it. The limitation of another citizen’s ability to do what he wishes can also condemn the action. Doing “what one wishes” is not a byword for antidemocratic action, but can have such a connotation because of the particular actors or victims of the actions. It is the misuse of the natural qualities of a citizen that leads to censure.

In Chapter 4, I offer a new theory of citizen power. Every adult male citizen would have been free, but this also made him kurios, or empowered, as opposed to ceding his power to a slave master. When substantivized, kurios indicated a male citizen’s institutionalized role as the head of a household. The lens of the household kurios generates an understanding of citizen power that encompasses both private and public domains. Not simply power as domination, kurios also indicated a shared power to act. As a conceptual metaphor, kurios was applied to the political sphere and structured thought across these different domains. Thus, qualities of the term kurios in its original domain, the household, corresponded systemically in the applied domain, the city. The laws and the corporate citizen body, too, were understood as kurioi. While there may be competing claims to power, the identification of the citizen as sharing in power with and through the laws and the dēmos is distinct from the modern conception of the individual versus the state. The negotiation of power in this way has repercussions for debates regarding sovereignty and the rule of law.

After outlining the motivation for a second edition, this opens with a brief account (‘Origins’) of how the book first came to be written and published. It then proceeds to discuss (‘Continuities and Changes’) the 1960s-early ‘70s historiographical context in which it was created and its positive reception on first publication. Some criticisms, questions and suggestions raised by readers and reviewers are also outlined and discussed. The following section (‘New Ways and New Work’) canvasses the impact of the digital revolution on scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, together with the burgeoning of specialised research, and explains how the large body of new work bearing on the history of the early modern inns has been accommodated in the following text.The final section (Future Directions) looks at challenges and opportunities for further research on the inns, addressing a wide range of questions and topics of interest to both general and legal historians.

The first section (‘Centralisation’) traces the consolidation of authority in the hands of the benchers, whose internal supremacy appears to have been of fairly recent origin, and the growing interest of Elizabethan governments in the societies, with the effect of strengthening the benchers’ powers. Before the great expansion of membership, most of the routine administrative chores necessary to keep the societies operating on a day-to-day basis were undertaken by members themselves. But thereafter there was increasing reliance on salaried officers or servants (‘Bureaucratisation’), especially the creation of full-time administrative positions to assist the nominal temporary head of each society, the treasurer. On-going provision of catering and lodging depended on a continuously expanding domestic establishment. However the inns had both a ‘Servant Problem’, and a ‘Management Problem’. Servants depended for much of their income on tips and perquisites, leading to various conflicts of interest, while much of the responsibility for overseeing the societies’ affairs was shouldered by a small minority of benchers. The chapter concludes with a glance at difficulties experienced in managing the societies’ finances, which encouraged the commutation of former academic requirements into cash payments.

The nature of whatever ‘Political Education’ was imparted to students at the inns is difficult to determine. While possibly enhancing their political awareness, it did not simply operate in one direction. Historians have been impressed by links between the inns and parliament, but contemporaries were probably more aware of their ties with the royal court. ‘Court Connections’ were manifest in masques presented at court, and associations between prominent courtiers and the inns, as well as between the central government and the inns’ rulers. The most spectacular demonstration of this affinity was the 1634 joint masque, The Triumph of Peace, an extravaganza presented by all four inns in repudiation of William Prynne and his alleged libel against women actresses, including Queen Henrietta Maria.

But ‘Towards Civil War’ shows that the rapprochement between the inns andCharles I’s court was never complete. The inns lay low during the political struggles before the outbreak of hostilities, although an armed band of 500 students offered their services to the king just before his attempted arrest of the 5 members in January 1642.When war did come, the inns’ allegiance was effectively determined by their location in parliamentarian London.