IN December 1422, an anonymous lawyer put his pen to a fresh quire of paper to record the names of 23 fellows who were required to be present ‘here’—no place name is given—over Christmas. This great feast separated two terms in the legal year and there was a stiff fine for absence. He wrote in French and annotated each name with the number of previous occasions that that individual had attended ‘Nowell’, some once, some twice and some three times.
In this list, written almost exactly 600 years ago, is to be found the first documentary evidence for the existence of the society of lawyers familiar today as Lincoln’s Inn. To judge from the attendance at previous Christmases, the society had, in fact, been constituted since at least 1420. Other documentary evidence pushes that date back slightly to 1419 and possibly 1417, but whether it was already long-established at that time is not certainly known.
‘Everything about the origins of the four medieval societies of lawyers is mysterious’
The list is the opening entry in a long series of administrative records compiled by the Inn and collectively
