witan, “wise man” + gemot, “assembly.” After William’s conquest, it lost influence and was replaced by the curia regis, or “king’s court,” a sort of court of justice whose functions varied considerably with time. In Harry Potter, the high court of wizarding law is called the Wizengamot. It appears Ms. Rowling is familiar with her history.

— For more information on Edward the Confessor, see “A Brief History of Westminster Abbey” in Quotidian 1.10.

WELL I'LL BE!
THE ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS YOU NEVER ASKED

Why is the legal profession referred to as “the bar”?

This peculiar nomenclature comes from 13th century England, when the study of law was done largely through clerking for a judge or training at one of several “Inns of Chancery.” These inns taught students legal fundamentals but not the theory or finer points of the law. Thus, when the system grew more and more complex, there arose a need for a more thorough form of education. The “Inns of Court” filled this gap by providing extensive training and practical experience through the use of such things as mock trials. These trials were presided over by judges and practicing lawyers, who were separated from the rest of the hall by a railing or barrier known as the bar. As students gained experience and advanced within their class, they were “called within the bar” and allowed to preside over the mock trials. The students became known as barristers, an appellation still in use by the English courts to this day.

Source: The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories.

Why is the Middle East so named?

The term Middle East does not refer to a specific geographic region with static borders, but to a general area between the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. It includes Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, among other nations. The term is Eurocentric in origin, and dates from before World War I. At that time, western Europe (England in particular, since it had a spectacular amount of global control) used the term Near East to refer to the Balkans (Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, and Serbia) and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey). The region further east was the Middle East, and the region beyond that was the Far East. The latter included China, Japan, Korea, and Siam (Thailand). After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the term Near East fell out of use, but the others remained.
               In 1884, a convocation of 25 nations met in Washington, D.C. to establish an international meridian line. It was decided this line should pass through Greenwich, England, and so it was natural that everything to the right of it on the map should be east, and everything to the left should be west (if we are looking at the popular Mercator projection, with North America on the left hand side). Hence the modern notion that