xxii INTRODUCTION

tion to deputize other attorneys.¹ In some instances the distinction between
the attorneys in fact and the trained attorneys at law is not easily applied;
some of those who acted as agents developed a business of serving as attor-
neys in the courts and overstepped and obscured the dividing line. But there
were, and continued to be, attorneys in fact only, or proxies, who were not
and did not pretend to be attorneys at law, even if set down as " attorneys "
without distinction.

The attorneys at law, those who may be said to have formed a truly
professional bar, were not at that time, nor for a century afterwards, men
whose sole occupation in life was their work in the law. The chief occupa-
tion of substantially all men was the cultivation and marketing of tobacco.
Work in the law was only periodic, having been, with possible minor excep-
tions, taken up only at the brief court terms in each year; pleadings were
filed only when the courts opened their terms, and whole terms intervened
between successive steps in the pleading. The attorneys at law were, indeed,
men of expert training in the law, but not exclusively practitioners of it.
Just what were the beginnings of this truly professional bar is the subject
of uncertainty. As early as 1637 opinions of leading men were taken on
questions of law, and brief notes of the earliest provincial court sessions show
an observance of the distinctions between causes of action at common law
and an approximate adherence to the rules of procedure in England. There
is a reported instance of the requirement of special qualifications for an
attorney in 1657; a Captain William Mitchell was refused permission to act
as attorney in other men's causes because he did not possess the qualifications
required by the English statute of 1605," which provided that none should
be admitted attorney in any of the king's courts unless brought up in the
same, or otherwise well practiced in the soliciting of causes, and found by
their dealings to be skilful and honest. In the following year, one Luke
Gardner, in a petition to the governor and council to compel Thomas
Gerrard and his wife to give him a deed of land in place of one found to be
insufficient, said: " yo^r Pet^r hath severall times shewed the Deed to divers
persons well skilled in the law, to have their Opinions Whither or noe it
were sufficient." ³

Whatever the beginnings, in the decade of the i66o's the courts are
found admitting what were denominated " sworn attorneys of the court,"
evidently men of special training in the law; and these constituted a profes-
sional bar. There is a traditional belief in Maryland that uncertainties and
errors in the original definition of boundaries of lands caused an extraor-
dinary amount of litigation, and drew to the province a supply of lawyers
larger than that in other colonies.⁴ In the preambles of several statutes

¹ Archives, XLI, 233.

2 Stat. 3 James I, ch. 7; ibid., XLI, 10.

s Ibid., XLI, 143.

* J. T. Scharf, History of Western Maryland (Philadelphia, 1882), pp. 380 et seq.