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But though English lawyers were thus expressly forbidden in 1362 to plead in Law-French, they persisted in using the hybrid jargon for reports and treatises so late as George II.'s reign; and for an equal length of time they seized every occasion to introduce scraps of Law-French into their speeches at the bars of the different courts.
"Here I must stay to observe," says the author, enthusiastically, "the necessity of a student's early application to learn the old Law-French, for these books, and most others of considerable authority, are delivered in it.
The restorers who raised Charles II. to his father's throne, lost no time in recalling Latin to the records and writs; and so gladly did the reporters and the practising counsel avail themselves of the reaction in favor of discarded usages, that more Law-French was written and talked in Westminster Hall during the time of the restored king, than had been penned and spoken throughout the first fifty years of the seventeenth century.
He describes the elaborate processes which had to be gone through before a hearing could be obtained; the distance of courts from the litigants; the bandying of cases from court to court; the chicaneries about giving notice; the frequent nullification of all that had been done on account of some technical flaw; the unintelligible jargon of Latin and Law-French which veiled the proceedings from the public; the elaborate mysteries of 'special pleading'; the conflict of jurisdictions, and the manufacture of new 'pleas' and new technical rules; the 'entanglement of jurisdictions, and especially the distinction between law and equity, which had made confusion doubly confounded.
Some may think that because the Law-French is no better than the old Norman corrupted, and now a deformed hotch-potch of the English and Latin mixed together, it is not fit for a polite spark to foul himself with; but this nicety is so desperate a mistake, that lawyer and Law-French are coincident; one will not stand without the other."
Roger North's essay 'On the study of the Laws' contains amusing testimony to the affection with which the lawyers of his day regarded their Law-French, and also shows how largely it was used till the close of the seventeenth century by the orators of Westminster Hall.
Under Charles II., James II., and William III. the law-student was compelled to muster the barbarous Law-French; but the books which he was required to read were few in comparison with those of a modern Inns-of-Court man. But the student was advised to read this small library again and again, "common-placing" the contents of its volumes, and also "common-placing" all new legal facts.
And then also, being an utter-barrister, I had twice argued our Middle-Temple reader's case at the cupboard, and sat nine times in our hall at the bench, and argued such cases in English as had before been argued by young gentlemen or utter-barristers in Law-French bareheaded."
The judge having thus decided, the inquiry proceeded without the help of an interpreter the counsel for the prosecution favoring the jury with an eloquent harangue, no single sentence of which was intelligible to them; a series of witnesses proving to English auditors, beyond reach of doubt, that the prisoner had deliberately murdered his wife; and finally the judge instructing the jury, in language which was as insignificant to their minds as the same quantity of obsolete Law-French would have been, that it was their duty to return a verdict of 'Guilty. Throwing themselves into the humor of the business, the Welsh jurymen, although they were quite familiar with the facts of the case, acquitted the murderer, much to the encouragement of many wretched Welsh husbands anxious for a termination of their matrimonial sufferings.
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