Edward Coke - Education and Call To The Bar

Education and Call To The Bar

At the age of eight in 1560, Coke began studying at the Norwich Free Grammar School. The education there was based on erudition, the eventual goal being that by sixth-form level the students have learnt "to vary one sentence diversely, to make a verse exactly, to endight an epistle eloquently and learnedly, to declaim of a theme simple, and last of all to attain some competent knowledge of the Greek tongue". The students were taught rhetoric based on the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Greek centred around the works of Homer and Virgil. Coke was taught at Norwich to value the "forcefulness of freedom of speech", something he later applied as a judge. Little is known about his time there, although it is implied in later accounts that he was a diligent student who applied himself well.

After leaving Norwich in 1567 he matriculated to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied for three years until the end of 1570, when he left without gaining a degree. Little is known of his time at Trinity – he certainly studied rhetoric and dialectics under a program instituted in 1559, but although he is considered to have had all the intelligence to be a good student little is known of his academic achievements there. Coke was proud of Cambridge and the time he spent there, later saying in Dr. Bonham's Case that Cambridge and Oxford were "the eyes and soul of the realm, from whence religion, the humanities, and learning were richly diffused into all parts of the realm."

After leaving Trinity College he travelled to London, where he became a member of Clifford's Inn in 1571. This was to learn the basics of the law – the Inns of Chancery, including Clifford's Inn, served as a place of initial legal education before transfer to the Inns of Court, where one could be called to the Bar and practice as a barrister. Students were educated through arguments and debates – they would be given precedents and writs each day, discuss them at the dinner table and then argue a moot based on those precedents and their discussions. Coke also studied various writs "till they turned honey sweet on his tongue", and after completing this stage of his legal education transferred to the Inner Temple on 24 April 1572.

At the Inner Temple he began the second stage of his education, reading legal texts such as Glanville's Treatises and taking part in moots. It was here he first drew notice, arguing well in an Inner Temple moot and asserting that the Inner Temple cook had failed to prepare edible food. He took little interest in the theatrical performances or other pieces of high culture at the Inns, preferring to spend his time at the law courts in Westminster Hall, listening to the Serjeants argue. After six years at the Inner Temple he was called to the Bar on 20 April 1578, a remarkably fast rate of progress given the process of legal education at the time, which normally required eight years of study. Polson suggests that this was due to his knowledge of the law, which "excited the Benchers".