The professional body of lawyers, and the subject of the acronym that was never one.
Documented
A rail, not a registry
The bar is the physical barrier separating the public from the court's officers, documented in English courtrooms for centuries. To be called to the bar was to be admitted past it. Bar associations are professional organizations named for that rail; in the United States they are state-level bodies, several predating any theory about them.
Assessment: Fully documented. No British Accreditation Registry exists in any registry, statute, or archive, and the movement has never produced its founding documents.
Stories
The Crown still collects
The story: American lawyers swear allegiance to a British body, titles of nobility hide in the word esquire, and a missing thirteenth amendment banning titles of nobility proves the cover-up.
Assessment: The Titles of Nobility Amendment is documented: proposed in 1810, never ratified, and later misprinted in some collections, which seeded the myth. Esquire carries no allegiance; bar exams are set by states. Every element has a mundane paper trail.
Interesting claims
The guild did capture the law, quietly
The defensible version: bar associations genuinely do gatekeep legal practice, set prices through licensing, and lobby, and unauthorized-practice rules mean the law is the only profession whose customers must hire its members to use it. No British registry required.
Assessment: Documented as institutional economics. The archive notes the pattern again: a real monopoly anxiety, narrated as a foreign conspiracy because furniture is a less exciting villain than the Crown.
Sources and further reading
Oxford English Dictionary, bar, the courtroom rail
Titles of Nobility Amendment, congressional record 1810
State bar enabling statutes, e.g. State Bar Acts
Worth asking
If the conspiracy were real, why would it leave its name in the acronym and its documents nowhere?