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PRINTED FOR LONGMAN, REES, ORME, BROWN, & GREEN: PATERNOSTER POT

AND JOHN TAYLOR, UPPER GOWER STREET

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BIOGRAPHY.

BRITISH LAWYERS.

SIR EDWARD COKE.

1550-1634.

EDWARD COKE, afterwards solicitor and attorney-general, and successively lord chief justice of the courts of common pleas and of the king's bench, was descended from an ancient family in the county of Norfolk. He was the son of Robert Coke, Esq. of Mileham, in that county, a barrister of great practice, and a bencher of Lincoln's Inn, by Winifred, daughter and coheiress of William Knightley, of Morgrave Knightley, in the same county. He was born at Mileham in the year 1550; and at the age of ten years was sent to the free-school at Norwich; whence he was removed to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he remained for four years. At the expiration of that period he became a member of Clifford's Inn; and in the course of the next year of the Inner Temple. While a student of the latter society, he is said to have exhibited proofs of the high legal talents by which he was afterwards so greatly distinguished. At the end of six years he was called to the bar; a very short probation, the usual period being at that time eight years.

*

The first case in which he appeared in the king's bench was the Lord Cromwell's case, in Trinity term *Dugdale's Origines, p. 159. B

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