Senior lawyer to articling clerk: “Take this brief and at all costs, file it with the Court. You’ve got to get through, lad - our client’s counting on us.”
Articling clerk: “Aye, aye, Sarj!”
Senior lawyer: “God speed, lad!”
then to himself, after the young clerk leaves: “God, I hate sending a kid out on a job like that. I’m getting too old for this racket.” Retires to chambers for a soothing glass of port.
Well, maybe not quite. But for several centuries, the English legal system had “serjeants at law”, the lawyers who had the exclusive right of audience in the Court of Common Pleas.
What’s the connexion, if any, between the word “serjeant” in this legal context, and the word “sergeant” meaning a senior non-com in the army?
According to the OED, the etymology is the same, with the English word deriving from the Old French, ‘sergent’. There were a whole range of uses in English, all related to the original meaning of servant.
But there is a minor complication, in that the OED also suggests that ‘serjeant at law’ ‘represents the law Latin serviens ad legem’, so it could be argued that the original legal job title wasn’t quite the same and that it was slightly mistranslated into English using the pre-existing English word. But then that word meant servant anyway.
Its use as a military rank is later, but was presumably influenced by earlier job titles, such as ‘sergeant-at-arms’.
A “sargent/sergeant- at arms” was a type of mounted man at arms who served in a "knight’s “lance” - usually a Knight Banneret, a knight-batchelor, a sergeant or two and a squire-at-arms, that last being a squire about to be knighted.
I know medieval/early modern English spelling was much more flexible than modern spelling, but would the “j” spelling have been adopted at some point to disintguish the two types of serg/j/eants?