Definition
A historical requirement of English legal education by which a law student was obligated to eat a specified number of dinners in the hall of one of the Inns of Court during a given term, thereby causing that term to "count" toward the student's eligibility to be called to the bar. The practice treated communal dining as a formal component of legal training — on the theory that shared meals with senior barristers and fellow students constituted a form of professional formation and apprenticeship. A term that met the minimum dining requirement was said to have been "kept." A term in which the student failed to attend the requisite number of dinners did not count toward the total needed for call.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Keeping" means maintaining or preserving something in a particular state; "term" in an academic or legal context means a defined period of time.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Keep" carries the sense of fulfilling an obligation or observance — as in "to keep an appointment" or "to keep the Sabbath." "Term" denotes a fixed or limited period.
The legal phrase "keeping term" draws on this older sense of "keep" as active observance of a duty, not mere passive endurance of time. The gap matters because a modern reader might assume the phrase refers to completing or serving out a term of study in the ordinary sense. It does not. It describes a discrete ceremonial and social act — attendance at a sufficient number of dinners — that the English legal system formally recognized as constituting a term of professional qualification.
Common Confusion
Keeping term should not be confused with the simple passage of time within a term. A student could be physically present in London, enrolled at an Inn of Court, and studying diligently for an entire term while still failing to "keep" it, if the required number of dinners was not attended. The distinction matters for historical research: references in older English legal records to a student having "kept" a certain number of terms are statements about dining compliance and bar eligibility, not merely about enrollment or residence.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working with historical English legal sources — particularly biographies, Inn of Court records, legal education histories, and bar admission records from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries — will encounter "keeping term" as a technical term of art. Several points bear watching:
First, the phrase appears frequently in contexts that look biographical or administrative but are actually statements of credential status. When a source says a barrister "kept eight terms," it is describing a formal qualification milestone, not a length of study.
Second, the requirement was the subject of periodic controversy and reform throughout English legal history. Critics argued that dining requirements had become a hollow formality, serving caterers more than students. Reformers in the nineteenth century pushed to replace or supplement the system with actual examinations. Any source that references keeping term must be read against the reform context of its period — what the requirement demanded in 1750 may differ from what it demanded in 1870.
Third, American researchers should note that this practice never formally took root in the United States. American bar admission developed along entirely different lines, moving toward law school education, apprenticeship reading, and eventually bar examinations. References to keeping term in American sources almost invariably concern English-trained lawyers or commentary on the English system.
Fourth, the phrase does not appear in modern legal usage in any operative sense. It is a dead letter as a living legal requirement, having been substantially reformed or abolished as Inns of Court modernized their qualification requirements.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary define the term identically and concisely, each describing it as "[i]n English law. A duty performed by students of law, consisting in eating a sufficient number of dinners in hall to make the term count for the purpose of being called to the bar." Bouvier cites Mozley & Whiteley's Law Dictionary for the definition. The two entries are in complete agreement.
What the historical dictionaries do not supply is context: neither explains how many dinners were required, how the requirement varied across the different Inns of Court (Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Lincoln's Inn, Gray's Inn), or how the requirement changed over time through reform efforts. Neither addresses why the practice existed — the professional formation rationale — nor its eventual obsolescence. Researchers should treat the dictionary entries as a starting point and consult histories of the Inns of Court for the full picture.
Jurisdictional Note
Keeping term was exclusively an English (and by extension Welsh) legal institution, tied to the particular structure of the English bar and the Inns of Court. It has no direct counterpart in Scottish, Irish, or American legal education. Commonwealth jurisdictions that modeled their bar admission on English practice may have inherited analogous dining requirements in their early periods, but the specific phrase and its technical content belongs to the English Inn of Court tradition.