Terry Jackson wrote: >Sure the term "lawyer" was around, and for a long time. Don't >you recall Shakespeare's famous line: "First we must kill all >the lawyers" I don't have a Dictionary of Quotations at hand to check that one :-) The other (informal) maxim about practicing lawyers is that they don't make wills for themselves! Guess they know the costs involved. I have this problem with a seventeenth-century ancestor. Variously described as a lawyer or attorney, he seems never to have got around to making a will. When he died in 1677, he dictated his will on his deathbed. This is annoying, because he left a property to a son Nathaniel (who existed as a known son) which seems to have ended up in the hands of a James (who isn't known as a son) - so was this the wandering mind of a man close to death or a mistake of the witness who wrote the will down or the diktat of a family conclave? Or maybe they just did these things to annoy future generations! Chris chris@dickinson.uk.net