FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES. 6 1 



stimulated by the denunciation of usury. By one of those 

 paralogisms which have misled men far more widely from the 

 mark than ordinary sophisms, a medieval law made contracts 

 for loans on usury void. By pedantic, perhaps interested 

 reasoning, the same law allowed the equitable interpretation 

 of contracts, by which alone the mischief, which is undoubtedly 

 attached to -usury, can be checked, to be limited to contracts 

 for the pledging of land at interest only. The needy land- 

 owner was therefore protected by equity, the ordinary debtor 

 was debarred from usury, and left to the extreme severity of 

 the old law of contracts, which condemned the man who could 

 not pay to the extreme penalties that to our own day were 

 put on insolvency. And on the other hand, the trading debtor, 

 after having been treated with signal severity, has been gradually 

 allowed to escape his just liabilities, under a system which has 

 inflicted more injury on commercial honour than the utmost 

 harshness of the old law could have imposed on commercial 

 enterprise. 



The opulence of the fifteenth century encouraged litigation, 

 and the growth of the spirit of litigation was a concern to the 

 legislature and to the moralist. At the beginning of Henry 

 the Fourth's reign, complaint is made in Parliament of the 

 number of attorneys, and the king, in assenting to the petition 

 of the Commons, directs that the judges shall make and keep 

 a register of such persons as shall be qualified and allowed to 

 serve as attorneys. In some places the number of licensed 

 attorneys is limited to a small fraction of those who had prac- 

 tised. So dissatisfied was the parliament in the beginning of 

 the fifteenth century with the increase of the legal profession, 

 that in the sixth year of Henry the Fourth, the whole profession 

 qui in jure Regni vel docti fuissent vel apprentice were 

 declared ineligible for the representation of the counties. 

 There was little chance of their being chosen by the boroughs. 



Gascoigne traces the growth of the litigious spirit and the 

 multiplication of lawyers to the impropriation of tithes to 

 monasteries, to the decay of the parochial system, and to the 



