and ordain from every county a certain number of attorneys and apprentices of the law, of the best and most apt for their learning and skill, to do service to his court and people, and those so ehosen should follow his court and transact the affairs therein, and no others ; the king and his council deeming the number of fourscore to be sufficient for that employment ; but it was left to the discretion of the said justices to add to that number, or to diminish it, as they should think fit.* At this period the Court of Common Pleas had been fixed at Westminster, which brought together the professors of the common law at London ; and about the period of the dissolution of the order of the Temple, a society appears to have been in progress of formation, under the sanction of the judges, for the education of a body of learned secular lawyers to attend upon that court. The deserted convent of the Knights Templars, seated in the suburb of London, away from the noise and bustle of the city, and presenting a ready and easy access by water to Westminster, was a desirable retreat for the learned members of this infant legal society; and we accordingly find, that very soon after the dissolution of the rehgio-military order of Knights Templars, the professors of the common law of England mustered in considerable strength in the Temple. In the sixth year of the reign of Edward the Third, (A. a. 1333,) when the lawyers had just established themselves in the convent of the Temple, and had engrafted upon the old stock of Knights Templars their infant society for the stndy of the practice of the common law, the judges of the Court of Common Pleas were made KNIQHTS,* being the earliest instance on record * Et quod ipsj quos ltd hoc elegerUvt, curiam BequAatur, et so de negotiis in eadem. curia intromittant, et arti non. Et videtur regi et ejus concilio, quod septiea vigenti sufBcere potermi, 6tc—Λο/» tfParl. 20. E. 1. vol. i. p. 84, No. 22. t Duffd. Orig. Jurid., cap. xxxix. p. 102.