at st. mary's 13

themselves with sufficient knowledge to care for
their own affairs, at least, and we meet with re-
ports of laymen of extraordinary legal knowledge.
It had been so from time immemorial in England,
and perhaps it would be more accurate to say that
the abandonment of knowledge and skill in the
law to the specialists came gradually, and had in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not yet
progressed so far as we are apt to assume now-
adays. In the fifteenth century, as Holdsworth
shows, men learned the law as they learned the
rules of sword play, and "every man who had
property to protect, if not every well educated
woman also, was perfectly well versed in the ordi-
nary forms of legal processes." ^2e Hubert Hall,
in his "Society in the Elizabethan Age", reports
that every man was in that period his own lawyer
up to a certain point, and that Will Darrell, the
litigious hero of Hall's book, was "intimately
versed in every detail connected with the law of
real property." ²⁷ And Harris and McHenry, the
editors of the first reports of Maryland decisions
(1809), gave as one of the justifications of their
labors that it was "of great moment to every land-
holder, that the principles by which he holds his
property should be familiarized to him."²⁸ Fur-
thermore, there were books instructing justices in
almost every possible detail of practice in their
courts, and all justices in Maryland were required
to equip themselves with the statute books of Eng-

26. Holdsworth, II, 416 and 556.

27. Pages 141 and 144.

28. 1 Harris & McHenry, vi.