The Profession of Ecclesiastical Lawyers: An Historical Introduction. By R. H. Helmholz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 248. $116.00 (cloth); $34.99 (paper); $28.00 (digital). ISBN: 9781108499064.

Abstract

The history of English law is a discipline within legal study that has long been well served by scholars. More recently within this field there has been a renaissance in the scholarship on the history of the legal profession, with a focus on the common lawyers, trained at the Inns of Court, including that by Sir John Baker, who in his work Monuments of Endlesse Labours: English Canonists and Their Work, 1300–1900 (1998), produced a splendid collection of short biographies of the English civilians. However, what this field of scholarship has lacked is a substantial study of thewhole community of lawyers in Englandwho practiced in the church courts both before and after the sixteenth century Reformation. There could hardly be anyone more qualified than the legal historian R. H. Helmholz to undertake this work and fill this gap for, as he says in the preface to his The Profession of Ecclesiastical Lawyers: An Historical Introduction, “it has enabled me to make good use of information uncovered in the course of my research from the archives of the English ecclesiastical courts—a task and pleasure that has occupied virtually all of my academic career, now over fifty years in length” (ix). What makes this work so valuable is that it is more than a history of the ecclesiastical law or even a history of the church courts. Rather the study comes alive because it delves into the lives and personalities of those who practiced ecclesiastical law from the medieval period to the nineteenth century. As Helmholz says in making a comparison to his earlier works, “I have endeavoured to put [the people] back” (ix). The book is organized into two parts. In the first, “The Profession Described” Helmholz surveys the profession in the period, looking at the law that regulated the professional conduct of the lawyers, the nature of the lawyers’ education, and their reaction to both the English Reformation and the build-up to the English Civil War. He begins with terminology and categorization: in the same way that the common law divides its lawyers into barristers and attorneys, so those who administered the church law are either advocates or proctors. Helmholz describes this highly stratified and regulated profession, from the regulators (pope to archbishop) to the professional ethics applicable to these lawyers. Next, he deals with their education: the study of civil and canon law at the universities, subjects studied, mode of study, and methods of assessment. In his chapter on the reaction of the