Both before, and for a very considerable period after, the Norman conquest, the study of the law was confined to the ecclesiastics, who engrossed all the learning and knowledge of the age.[575] In the reign of king Stephen, the foreign clergy who had flocked over after the conquest, attempted to introduce the ancient civil law of Rome into this country, as calculated to promote the power and advantage of their order, but were resolutely resisted by the king and the barons, who clung to their old customs and usages. The new law, however, was introduced into all the ecclesiastical courts, and the clergy began to abandon the municipal tribunals, and discontinue the study of the common law. Early in the reign of Henry the Third, episcopal constitutions were published by the bishop of Salisbury, forbidding clerks and priests to practise as advocates in the common law courts. (_Nec advocati sint clerici vel sacerdotes in foro sæculari, nisi vel proprias causas vel miserabilium personarum prosequantur._[576]) Towards the close of the same reign, (A. D. 1254,) Pope Innocent IV. forbade the reading of the common law by the clergy in the English universities and seminaries of learning, because its decrees were not founded on the _imperial constitutions_, but merely on the _customs of the laity_.[577] As the common law consequently gradually ceased to be studied and taught by the clergy, who were the great depositaries of legal learning, as of all other knowledge in those days, it became necessary to educate and train up a body of laymen to transact the judicial business of the country; and Edward the First, who, from his many legal reforms and improvements, has been styled "the English Justinian," made the practice of the common law a distinct profession. In antient times the Court of _Common Pleas_ had the exclusive administration of the _common law_, and settled and decided all the disputes which arose between _subject_ and _subject_; and in the twentieth year of the reign of Edward the First, (A. D. 1292,) the privilege of pleading causes in this court was confined to a certain number of learned persons appointed by authority. By an order in council, the king commanded John de Metingham, chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and the rest of his fellow justices, that they, according to their discretions, should provide 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 chosen 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.[578]