A DOORWAY IN SOUTH SQUARE, GRAY’S INNItis one of several classic entrances of this type in the Square, and bears the date 1738.
A DOORWAY IN SOUTH SQUARE, GRAY’S INNItis one of several classic entrances of this type in the Square, and bears the date 1738.
A DOORWAY IN SOUTH SQUARE, GRAY’S INN
Itis one of several classic entrances of this type in the Square, and bears the date 1738.
attributed to Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam. But references to it occur before 1576, the year in which he became a Member of the Inn.[62]But it was not till 1737 that the need was felt for the erection of a building specially intended to house it. Then an Order was passed for building a Library in Holborn Court, now known as South Square. A hundred years later additions were made, and in 1883 a new Library building was added, which is entered separately from the internal angle of South Square, and which fronts externally upon the then newly-made Gray’s Inn Road. The Library boasts a small but valuable collection of manuscripts, including that of Bracton’s ‘De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliæ.’
The old Hall was rebuilt in 1556. It follows the usual plan of a sixteenth-century Hall, having a raised dais and ‘high’ table at the east end, and the characteristic Tudor bay window on the north side. A very handsome oak screen, richly carved with Renaissance ornament, and divided into round arched bays by Ionic columns, conceals the vestibule. Above the enriched cartouche frieze of the Screen is an open and carved balustrade, extremely handsome, though oflater date, which forms a front to the Minstrel Gallery. A glazed lantern in the centre of the Hall indicates the ancient louvre. A very fine open timber roof of the hammer-beam type covers this charming room, and harmonizes with the eighteenth-century oak panelling, which lines the walls, and is decorated with the arms of the Treasurers. A large traceried window over the Minstrel Gallery, five mullioned and transomed windows on the south side, and four similar windows, in addition to the large bay window, on the north, adequately light the Hall. Many of the windows contain fine heraldic glass, with escutcheons of famous members of the Society.[63]On the walls of the Hall hang portraits of Kings Charles I. and II., and James II., Sir Nicholas Bacon and Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans, Baron Verulam, Lord Coke, Sir Christopher Yelverton (1602), Sir John Turton (1689), Lord Raymond, Chief Justice (1725), Sir James Eyre (1787), Sir John Hullock (1823), Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, etc. But the chief treasure is the portrait of Queen Elizabeth, hung above the dais, which was presented to the Society byHenry Griffith, one of the Masters of the Bench.
The exterior of the Hall was sadly ruined by the Goths, or Vandals, of 1826. The walls and gables of dark red brick, ornamented with brick battlements, and relieved by labels and mullions of stone, were, like those of the Chapel, rendered hideous by the stucco madness of the age; mean modern battlements were added; slate was substituted for the warm red tiles of the old roof; and a wooden lantern of new and feeble design placed instead of the octangular wooden lantern, with a leaded cupola, which rose from the centre of the roof. More recently the stucco disfigurations have been removed, and the old red-brick buttresses and walls with the stone labels have been happily revealed again.
There is a tradition in the Inn that the Screen which we have mentioned, and also some of the dining-tables now used in the Hall, were given to the Society by Queen Elizabeth. At dinner on Grand Day in each term ‘the glorious, pious, and immortal memory of good Queen Bess’ is still solemnly drunk in Hall. Certainly and happily this Hall, one of the most venerable and most beautiful of all the Halls in London, remains verymuch, as regards the interior, what it was in the days of the Virgin Queen.
There is another legend which connects the name of good Queen Bess with this Hall. It is said that Her Majesty was present at the performance in Gray’s Inn Hall of the masque, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ under the stage management of Shakespeare. There is no intrinsic improbability about this. Though the Pension Book does not record any visit of Elizabeth to Gray’s Inn, the nature of the entries is such that omission therefrom cannot be said to prove the non-occurrence of an event. Francis Bacon, who was made a Bencher in 1586, and was elected Treasurer in 1590, was apersona grataat Court, and not only took a delight in the preparation of pageantries, but also knew Shakespeare well. It is, therefore, quite likely that Queen Elizabeth visited the Inn on the occasion of the production of a masque by Shakespeare.[64]It is at least certain that in February, 1587, eight Members of Gray’s Inn, acting apparently with the approval of the Bench, produced a play called ‘The Misfortunes of Arthur’ for the entertainment of Queen Elizaabethat Greenwich while Her Majesty was visiting the fair. It was apparently in connection with this play that Bacon, being then Reader of Gray’s Inn, wrote to Lord Burleigh as follows: ‘There are a dozen gentlemen of Gray’s Inn that, out of the honour which they bear to your Lordship and my Lord Chamberlain, to whom at their last masque they were so much bounden, are ready to furnish a masque: wishing it were in their power to perform it according to their minds.’[65]
The Benchers and Students of Gray’s Inn indulged in the ChristmasSaturnaliaof Masques and Revels with as great, or even greater, zest than the other Societies of Lawyers. And Bacon, philosopher, statesman, and courtier, was by no means backward in his enjoyment of ‘Masques and Triumphs.’ ‘These things are but toys,’ he wrote, ‘but since Princes will have such things, it is better they should be graced with elegancy than daubed with cost.’ And accordingly he devoted some of his abundant energy to superintending the festivities in his own Inn, and even to assisting in the composition of some of the ‘Triumphs.’
As early as 1525 mention is made of a masque that was acted in the Hall here, which wascomposed by John Roo, Serjeant at the Law, and ‘sore displeased’ Cardinal Wolsey. George Gascoigne, the poet, a Member of the Inn, translated plays from the Greek (Euripides’ ‘Jocasta’—the ‘Phœnissæ’?) and Italian for the students to act. And now, in 1594, there were high festivities at Gray’s Inn, when an extravaganza was produced bearing the significant title: ‘History of the High and Mighty Prince Henry, Prince of Purpoole [Portpool], Archduke of Stapulia [Staple’s Inn] and Bernarda [Barnard’s Inn], Duke of High and Nether Holborn, Marquis of St. Giles and Tottenham, Great Lord of the Cantons of Islington, Kentish Town, Paddington, and Knightsbridge, Knight of the most Heroical Order of the Helmet and Sovereign of the same; who reigned and diedA.D.1594.’ Owing to the Hall being overcrowded on the first night, the students of the Inner and Middle Temples quitted the Hall in dudgeon, and the performance of the main piece had to be adjourned. To make up for the withdrawal of ‘The History of Prince Henry’ from the playbill, it was thought ‘good not to offer anything of account saving Dancing and Revelling with Gentlewomen.... To eke out the programme Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors” was then played by the players.’
Thus Gray’s Inn Hall shares with the Hall of the Middle Temple the distinction of being the only buildings now remaining in London in which, so far as we know, any of the plays of Shakespeare were performed in his own time.[66]
At Shrovetide the Prince of Purpoole and his company entertained Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich. After the performance Her Majesty ‘willed the Lord Chamberlain that the gentlemen should be invited on the next day, which was done, and her Majesty gave them her hand to kiss with most gracious words of commendation to them: particularly in respect of Gray’s Inn, as an House that she was much beholden unto for that it did always study for some Sports to present her with.’
The success of this Masque was no doubt largely due to the fact that it was supposed to contain veiled allusions to many living persons of note, and that these allusions, uttered by the mimic Councillors of the Purpoole Court, were known to be written by the greatest of the sons of Gray’s Inn, Bacon himself. ‘The speeches of the six Councillors,’ says James Spedding, ‘carry his signature in everysentence.’[67]That they were written by him, and by him alone, no one who is at all familiar with his style, either of thought or expression, will for a moment doubt.
The Masque prepared by Francis Beaumont, to celebrate the marriage of the Count Palatine with the Princess Elizabeth, was performed before the King and Royal Family in the Banqueting House at Whitehall (February 20, 1613), and Francis Bacon, it is recorded, then Solicitor-General, ‘spared no time in the setting forth, ordering, and furnishing’ of it.
On Twelfth Night, 1614, the ‘Maske of Flowers’ was presented ‘by the Gentlemen of Graies Inn’ in the same Banqueting Hall upon the occasion of the marriage of the Earl of Somerset. This Masque, when published, was dedicated to Sir Francis Bacon, who apparently bore the whole expense of the performance. In 1887 ‘The Masque of Flowers’ was revived, being again performed with great success in Gray’s Inn Hall. Other masques of this and later times are mentioned by Mr. Douthwaite (p. 234et seq.). Of the Masque performed by the Inns of Court before Charles I., which has been already referred to, ‘The Triumphof Peace,’ James Shirley, the dramatist, was the author. He had chambers in Gray’s Inn.
The form of self-government that obtained at Gray’s Inn was very similar to that which the other Inns enjoyed.
The Officer named Treasurer at other Inns was at Gray’s Inn known as the Pensioner. According to Sir Nicholas Bacon and some other Commissioners who drew up a report upon the Houses of Court for the information of Henry VIII., ‘a Pension, or, as some Houses call it, a Parliament,’ was summoned every quarter, or more if need be, ‘for the good ordering of the House, and the reformation of such things as seem meet to be reformed.’ These Pensions or Parliaments were ‘nothing else but a conference of Benchers and Utter Barristers only, and in some other Houses an Assembly of Benchers and such of the Utter Barristers and other ancient and wise men of the House as the Benchers have elected to them before time, and these together are named the Sage Company.’ This report does not mention the Ancients of Gray’s Inn. ‘The Grand Company of Ancients’ consisted of three classes—Barristers called by seniority to that degree; sons of Judges, who by right of inheritance were admitted Ancients; andpersons of distinction who, in the words of Fortescue already quoted, were placed in the Inns of Court, not so much to make the Laws their study as to form their manners and to preserve them from the contagion of vice. The Constitution of the Inns, and the correct relation between the Benchers and Junior Members, were not arrived at without certain crises. The internal politics of the Houses were occasionally lively. Thus at the Middle Temple the right of the Benchers to regulate the affairs of the Inn, without reference to the Parliaments of barristers and students to whom, apparently, the right of self-government within certain limits was, by ancient custom, entrusted in the Vacations, was a ground of hot dispute in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The right to hold a Parliament at any time was demanded. The Benchers replied that the Junior Members were only entitled to deliberate and represent on matters occurring in Vacation.[68]
The Chapel of Gray’s Inn Loftie describes with equal brevity and justice as ‘ancient, but without interest.’
In 1315 John, Lord Grey, had given lands in
GRAYS INN SQUARETheHall (on the right) was rebuilt in 1556, and the chapel, covered with greenish stucco (in the centre), is ancient, but has suffered much from wholesale restorations.
GRAYS INN SQUARETheHall (on the right) was rebuilt in 1556, and the chapel, covered with greenish stucco (in the centre), is ancient, but has suffered much from wholesale restorations.
GRAYS INN SQUARE
TheHall (on the right) was rebuilt in 1556, and the chapel, covered with greenish stucco (in the centre), is ancient, but has suffered much from wholesale restorations.
the manor to the Canons of St. Bartholomew, to endow a Chaplain. Chaplain and Chapel alike passed to the lawyers along with the Inn, and it is likely enough that the present old Chapel, in spite of plaster and bad stained glass, represents at heart the fourteenth-century Chapel of the Greys.
The earliest mention of it in the existing records of the Society is in the eleventh year of Elizabeth. It was ‘beautified and renewed’ at the end of the seventeenth century, and received a blanket of stucco, a fringe of silly battlements, and an ugly slate roof in the first part of the nineteenth. Some armorial bearings, chiefly of the seventeenth-century Bishops and Archbishops, survive in the Eastern Window of five lights, but much of the painted glass mentioned by Dugdale has disappeared or been removed to the Hall.
Beyond South Square stretches a delightful quadrangle of homogeneous houses, which contains a large gravelled centre, bordered by a few sickly plane-trees. This is Gray’s Inn Square, which, as we have seen, took the place of Coney Court and Chapel Court. It was at No. 1, Coney Court, burnt down in 1678, that Bacon, ‘the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind,’ is said to have lived. The site of his rooms is covered now by No. 1,Gray’s Inn Square, part of the row of buildings erected in 1868 at the West end of this Court. In 1622 Bacon was granted chambers in the Inn consisting of ‘certayne buildings in Graies Inne [of late called Bacon’s Buildings] for the terme of fiftie years.’
Francis Bacon was entered by his father, the Lord Keeper, on June 27, 1576, together with his four brothers, Nicholas, Nathaniel, Edward, and Anthony. This was that Sir Nicholas who founded the Cursitor’s Office or Inn, from which Cursitor Street takes its name; Cursitor Street, with its bitter memories of sponging-houses and bailiffs, which have been improved away along with the lumbering machinery of the law that made such things possible. Sir Nicholas had been Treasurer of the Inn in 1536. Francis Bacon, in the dedication quoted below, describes Gray’s Inn as ‘the place whence my father was called to the highest place of justice, and where myself have lived and had my proceedings, and therefore few men are so bound to their Societies by obligation both ancestral and personal as I am to yours.’ An Order in the following year, 1577, directed that all the sons of Sir Nicholas Bacon should be ‘of the Grand Company and not be bound to any vacations.’ In thetwenty-eighth year of Elizabeth, Francis Bacon was advanced to the Readers’ Table. He was elected Treasurer in 1608.[69]As Solicitor-General he dedicated his ‘Arguments of Law’ to ‘my lovinge friends and fellowes, the Readers, Ancients, Utter Barresters and Students of Graies Inn,’ signing himself ‘your assured loving friend and fellow, F. B.’
It was from Gray’s Inn that the procession of Earls, Barons, Knights and Gentlemen started, which accompanied him to Westminster when he became Lord Keeper. And it was to Gray’s Inn that he returned after his impeachment and fall, coming ‘to lie at his old lodgings,’ and write many of his Treatises and Essays. ‘Those noble studies,’ says Macaulay, the brilliant historian, who himself occupied chambers at No. 8, South Square, in a building that was destroyed to make room for the extension of the Library—‘those noble studies, for which he had found leisure in the midst of professional drudgery and of courtly intrigues, gave to this last sad stage of his life a dignity beyond what power or titles could bestow. Impeached, convicted, sentenced, driven with ignominy fromthe presence of his Sovereign, shut out from the deliberations of his fellow-nobles, loaded with debt, branded with dishonour, sinking under the weight of years, sorrows and diseases, Bacon was Bacon still.’ He commenced a Digest of the Laws of England, a History of England under the Tudors, a body of Natural History, a Philosophical Romance. ‘He made extensive and valuable additions to his Essays. He published the inestimable treatise, “De Augmentis Scientiarum.” The very trifles with which he amused himself in hours of pain and languor bore the marks of his mind. The best collection of jests in the world is that which he dictated from memory, without referring to any book, on a day on which illness had rendered him incapable of serious study.’ It is the brain and personality of such a genius that haunts this spacious, quiet square of Gray’s Inn. And presently we shall see how upon the Inn itself and its pleasaunces this many-sided mind impressed itself to our advantage.
Through an arch in the far angle of the Square we pass to a narrow, oblong building of the crudest early nineteenth-century type, looking across an ugly wall upon the noisy Gray’s Inn Road. This is the ugly line of Verulam Buildings (1811), whichCharles Lamb justly called ‘accursed,’ for they encroached upon the gardens, ‘cutting out delicate crankles, and shouldering away one or two of the stately alcoves of the terrace.’ A postern-gate at the far corner leads out to the junction of Gray’s Inn Road with Theobald’s Road, a dismal thoroughfare, which is bounded by a railing, through which a delightful vista of green trees and turf gladdens the sight of the passer-by—turf and green trees which form the gracious playground of the children for whom the gates are opened each summer evening.
Another Gateway by ‘Jockey Fields,’ in Theobald’s Road, leads past Raymond Buildings, the same kind of ugly, unabashed, stock-brick barracks as Verulam Buildings, and dating from the same period. Crude and unpleasing as these dull blocks are to behold, they have the great advantage of being very pleasant to live in, for they line and look out upon the Gardens which the great Philosopher laid out. Raymond Buildings end in Field Court, which in turn adjoins South Square. One side of Field Court is formed by the iron railings and fine iron Gateway (1723) which terminate the Gardens. Square stone gate-posts carry the Griffin of the Inn. For the device ofGray’s Inn is a Griffin, or, in a field sable. Within this Gate a broad avenue of plane-trees, flanked by grassy lawns and terraces, leads to a green earth-work terrace at the northern end of the gardens. This terrace was probably constructed with the intention of shutting out the view of the squalid houses that had begun to spring up in that direction.
James Spedding records that Raleigh, just before his last disastrous voyage to the New World, had a long conversation with Bacon in those Gardens. And it is said that Bacon planted here a ‘catalpa tree,’ very likely brought home by Raleigh, which still survives, and is certainly one of the oldest in England. This is the sprawling, senile tree, tottering to its grave with the aid of a dozen propping sticks, which forms a striking feature upon the left-hand side of the path, looking from the Gateway.
Bacon’s love of gardening is breathed in every line of his delightful Essay upon Gardens. ‘God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and palaces are but gross handyworks.’ And it appears probable that the Gardens of Gray’s Inn were laid out under his direction in 1597 andthe following years. For in 1597 the Society ordered ‘that the summe of £7 15s. 4d., due to Mr. Bacon for planting of trees in the walkes, be paid next terme.’ In the following year a further supply was ordered ‘of more yonge elme trees in the places of such as are decayed, and that a new Rayle and quicksett hedge bee set uppon the upper walke at the good discretion of Mr. Bacon and Mr. Wilbraham, soe that the charges thereof do not exceed the sum of seventy pounds.’ And, this limit having apparently been carefully observed, in 1600, £60 6s. 8d. was paid to Mr. Bacon ‘for money disbursed about the Garnishing of the Walkes.’
There is also record of a Summer-house erected by Bacon ‘upon a small mount’ in the Gardens, which bore a Latin inscription to the effect that Francis Bacon erected it in memory of Jeremy Bettenham, formerly Rector of the Inn, in the year 1609. It was destroyed in the eighteenth century.
The rooks which nest in the trees of Gray’s Inn Gardens, and which fare sumptuously upon the fragments of food daily offered to them by the residents in the Chambers of Gray’s Inn, made their first appearance when the elms on theChesterfield property in May Fair were felled. They appear to have driven out a pair of carrion crows which had built here time out of mind, and whose ancestors may well have looked down upon the author of the ‘Novum Organum,’ as he walked in those quiet alleys with his friend, or mused as he rested on the seat which was so callously destroyed a century and a half ago.[70]
The principal entrance to the Gardens was from Fullwood’s Rents, and, when coffee-drinking first came into vogue, Coffee-Houses sprang up here, and reaped a rich harvest from the crowds who made of Gray’s Inn Gardens a fashionable and popular promenade.
For Gray’s Inn Walks became as fashionable a resort in the seventeenth century as Merton Gardens at Oxford in the eighteenth, and when Pepys’ wife was ‘making some clothes,’ he took her here to observe the fashions. And Sir Roger de Coverley loved to pace the green terrace of Gray’s Inn.
The figure of the great Philosopher overshadows all others at Gray’s Inn, but the Society can boast a long line of members distinguished in Politics, the Law and Literature. Sir Philip Sidney was a Member of this Inn; so were John Hampdenand John Pym, and Thomas Cromwell became an Ancient in 1534.
Sir William Gascoigne, Chief Justice 1400, is claimed by both Gray’s Inn and the Middle Temple. The former can at any rate point to Gascoigne’s arms in the bay-window of the Hall.
George Gascoigne, the poet, William Camden, and William Dugdale, the great and learned antiquaries, were all members of Gray’s Inn. Among the poets who resided here are George Chapman, Samuel Butler, John Cleveland, Oliver Goldsmith, and Robert Southey, who entered the Inn in 1797. Cobbett dwelt here for a season, and another ‘Rymer’ in the author of the ‘Fœdera.’ Dr. Kenealy, who defended ‘the Claimant,’ was the last barrister to have business Chambers here, the tide of legal business having flowed down Chancery Lane. Gray’s Inn can boast a Royal Bencher in the person of H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught, who, by a ‘Special Pension’ in 1881, was admitted a Member, called to the Bar, and elected a Bencher in one day.
Such, in brief outline, is the history of the Four Inns of Court, in which is vested the monopoly of calling to the Bar of England such students as have kept terms at the Inn, and have commendedthemselves to the approval of the Benchers. Starting as independent voluntary associations of students and practisers of the law, either in connection with the Court of some great Justiciar, or merely in hostels, where the apprentices might find board and lodging during their years of learning, they developed into Societies, nobly housed, which controlled their students after a collegiate fashion.
Without charters, endowments, or title-deeds, they developed on the lines of self-governing Guilds, subject only to a certain ill-defined control by the Judges, whilst their property was vested in a self-elected Committee of Benchers for the time being. It is under the guidance of these Committees that the Inns of Court have gained and maintained their position through the centuries, training the successive generations of barristers in the high traditions of honour and ability characteristic of the English Bar, and imparting to their youthful apprentices at the law, through the social system of ‘keeping terms,’ the unwritten rules of right conduct in the legal profession.
It remains now to glance at the Inns which started level in the race with the Inns of Court, but whose history and development have been so different.
THE GABLED HOUSES OUTSIDE STAPLE INN, HOLBORNTheyare the sole survivors of Elizabethan domestic architecture to be found in the streets of London. The restoration of the frontage was made in 1884, under the care of Mr. Alfred Waterhouse.
THE GABLED HOUSES OUTSIDE STAPLE INN, HOLBORNTheyare the sole survivors of Elizabethan domestic architecture to be found in the streets of London. The restoration of the frontage was made in 1884, under the care of Mr. Alfred Waterhouse.
THE GABLED HOUSES OUTSIDE STAPLE INN, HOLBORN
Theyare the sole survivors of Elizabethan domestic architecture to be found in the streets of London. The restoration of the frontage was made in 1884, under the care of Mr. Alfred Waterhouse.
Asis the case with regard to the origin of the Inns of Court, the first beginnings of the Inns of Chancery are buried in obscurity, from which they can only be retrieved by the discovery of new documents. It seems probable, in the absence of definite evidence, that there was at first no distinction between Inns of Court and Inns of Chancery, but that, all alike, Inns of Court and the ten lesser Inns called Inns of Chancery, mentioned by Fortescue, were originally mere Hostels where Students of the Law congregated, lived and learned. Then, in course of time, the natural laws of differentiation and development came into play, and these Inns or Hostels gradually resolved themselves into two classes. The four great Inns of Court developed, as we have seen, from small associations in small hostels into great and wealthy institutions upon lines of aristocraticmonopoly. The other Inns, taking their names from the Clerks of the Chancery who chiefly studied there, passed through different stages of development into subjection under the Inns of Court, and after a period, during which they partly performed the function of preparatory schools for the preliminary training of young students who were afterwards admitted as members of the Inns of Court, crystallized into close corporations of Solicitors and Attorneys. Then all official connection between the two kinds of Inns came to an end.
Thus, whilst the Inns of Court became aristocratic Schools of Law, reserved for lawyers of gentle birth, the Inns of Chancery were gradually monopolized by Writ clerks, both of the Court of Chancery and of the Court of Common Pleas, and by other minor officials. These gradually ousted the well-born Apprentices who were training on for the Inns of Court. On the one hand Attorneys and Solicitors were excluded from the Inns of Court. In 1557, for instance, they were refused admission to the Inner Temple, and ordered to repair to their Inns of Chancery. In 1574 such as remained were expelled the House. The Middle Temple soon followed the example of the Inner.On the other hand, in spite of the remonstrances of the Benchers, the Attorneys, who had gained an ascendancy over the Inns of Chancery, set themselves to secure a monopoly of them. Without definitely excluding students for the Bar, they received them so ungraciously that, for instance, Sir Mathew Hale passed straight from Magdalen College, Oxford, to Lincoln’s Inn (1629). Indeed, John Selden, the antiquary (1584-1654), seems to have been the last of the great lawyers to be trained at these schools for the larger Societies. Thus one step in the ladder of education, so much approved by Coke and Fortescue, was eliminated. The Inns of Chancery were abandoned to the Attorneys.[71]They then gradually fell out of fashion and deteriorated in discipline as in prestige. By the middle of the eighteenth century they had become obsolete. But if they fell early into decline, their decadence was long drawn out. The proceedings of the Court of Chancery in 1900, in regard to the sale of Clifford’s Inn, marked their final disappearance.
Of these ten lesser Inns, mentioned by Fortescue as having, in his day, each one hundred students studying the first principles of the Law and preparingto pass into the four Inns of Court, all have been now dissolved, and many of them have been destroyed.
In the days when Clerks of Chancery and Attorneys dwelt in these Inns, together with embryo Barristers who were learning the rudiments of their legal craft, Stow neatly describes them as Provinces, for they were severally subject to one of the Inns of Court. Their relationship is obscure. Mr. Inderwick[72]compares it to that which the smaller seaport towns of the Kent and Sussex coast bore to the more important Cinque Ports.
An Inn of Court appointed Readers for its Inns of Chancery, settled the precedence of their Principals, admitted their members at a reduced fee, and entertained their Ancients at grand feasts and festivals. Each Inn of Chancery had its own Hall for meetings, moots, readings, and festivity, but none could boast of a Chapel of its own. It was only after having studied the necessary exercises at these ‘provincial’ Inns, including boltings, moots, and putting of cases, that the young students or apprentices were admitted as students at one of the four Inns of Court.
Of the Inns of Chancery, Staple Inn and Barnard’sInn were attached to Gray’s Inn; Clifford’s Inn, Clement’s Inn, and Lyon’s Inn to the Inner Temple; Furnival’s Inn and Thavie’s Inn to Lincoln’s Inn; and to the Middle Temple, New Inn and Strand Inn.
Of these by far the most interesting and picturesque at the present time is Staple Inn.
It was of this ‘little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles’ that Dickens wrote in ‘Edwin Drood’:
‘It is one of those nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having cotton in his ears, and velvet soles on his boots. It is one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter in smoky trees, as though they called to one another: “Let us play at country,” and where a few feet of garden-mould and a few yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny understandings.’
Nothing could be more striking or delightful than the block of quaint old buildings, with its overhanging stories of timber and rough-cast, and its gabled roof. The preservation of this delightful specimen of Elizabethan domestic architecture, which stands at Holborn Bars like an island of art in an ocean of crude ugliness, we owe to the wisdomand good taste of the Directors of the Prudential Assurance Company, to whom the site now belongs. It is a pleasure to express one’s gratitude to them.
Staple Inn Hall, which forms the south side of the first Court within the old entrance archway facing Holborn, was built and embellished between 1580 and 1592. The frontage dates from about the same time, so that Sir George Buck, writing in 1615, could describe it as ‘the fayrest Inn of Chancery in this University.’ The Hall is now used for the Institute of Actuaries. It retains a delightful little louvre, with a bell in a cupola. Mullioned windows and a charming Gothic doorway (1753) open, on the far side of the Hall, upon the garden front.
Beyond this old sunk garden, which is bounded by a terrace and iron railing, the Patent Office occupies part of what was once the property of the Inn. To the west the garden is overshadowed by the flamboyant atrocity of a gross Bank building. The houses which form these quiet courts were for the most part rebuilt in the eighteenth century. No. 10, in the second Court, is that immortalized by Dickens in ‘Edwin Drood’ (Chapter XI.). It was rebuilt in 1747, and the initials over the doorway donotstand for Perhaps John Thomas, orPerhaps Joe Tyler, nor for any other of the phrases the humourist suggests, but for plain Principal John Thomson, who ruled in that year.
Staple, or Stapled Inn, has been so called since the beginning of the fourteenth century (1313). The Staple Inn, or House, was the Warehouse in which commodities, especially wool, chargeable with export duties, might be stored, weighed, and taxed. It was the business of the Company of Staplers, established in the reign of Edward III., ‘to see the Custom duly paid.’[73]The proximity of Portpool Market—or Ely Fair, as it was called, after the Bishops of Ely, whose large property lay on the North side of Holborn—doubtless added much to the importance of this Staple Inn.
The site of this Inn may possibly have been included in the Old Temple property, which the Templars sold to the Bishopric of Lincoln when they moved South (Chapter I.). However that may be, some time in the fifteenth century Staple Inn ceased to have any claim to be a Customs-house,[74]and was given over to the Lawyers. Itwas not a surprising change, for the conduct of the King’s wool-trade and the settlement of the disputes that must have arisen in connection with the clearing of woollen merchandise for export were likely to have made ‘Le Stapled Halle’ long ere this a home of clerks and apprentices of the Law.[75]The steps by which this home of lawyers passed into the control of the ‘Grand Company and Fellows’ of Staple Inn, with a Principal and Pensioner at their Head, are not known. They must, at least, have been taken long before ‘the first Grant of the inheritance thereof to the Ancients of Gray’s Inn’ mentioned by Dugdale as being dated in the twentieth year of Henry VIII. The transaction referred to would seem to have been rather in the nature of the creation of a trust. At any rate, Staple Inn became an appendance of Gray’s Inn. But by the end of the last century it had long ceased to fulfil the functions either of a Customs-house or of an Inn for Law-students.
Finally, in 1884, the Society of Staple sold their property, and the Prudential Assurance Company presently acquired it. Under their public-spirited and artistic care, Mr. Alfred Waterhouse made a practical and scholarly restoration, displacing from
STAPLE INN HALL AND COURTYARDTheHall was built between 1580 and 1592, and has a fine hammer-beam roof, and some old stained glass in its windows.
STAPLE INN HALL AND COURTYARDTheHall was built between 1580 and 1592, and has a fine hammer-beam roof, and some old stained glass in its windows.
STAPLE INN HALL AND COURTYARD
TheHall was built between 1580 and 1592, and has a fine hammer-beam roof, and some old stained glass in its windows.
the frontage the plaster with which the eighteenth century had disfigured it.
The most famous occupant of rooms in Staple Inn was Dr. Johnson (1759), who came here after he had completed his ‘Dixonary.’ It was here that he wrote his little romance of ‘Rasselas,’ in order to pay for his mother’s funeral.
The Mackworth coat-of-arms over a modest doorway between 22 and 23 Holborn used to indicate until recently the entrance to Barnard’s Inn, the other Inn attached to Gray’s Inn.
This was the residence of Dr. John Mackworth, who was Dean of Lincoln in the reign of Henry VI. When leased by his successor to Lyonel Barnard, it took the name which it now bears. The Inn was let to students of Law as early as 1454, for in that year Stow records that there was a great affray in Fleet Street between ‘men of Court’ and the inhabitants there, in the course of which the Queen’s Attorney was slain. As punishment, the principal Governors of Clifford’s Inn, Furnival’s Inn, and Barnard’s Inn were sent to prison.
Barnard’s Inn was governed by a Principal and twelve Ancients. The study of legal forms was insisted on with great strictness. Fines were imposed of one halfpenny for every defective word,one farthing for every defective syllable, and one penny for every improper word in writing the writs according to the form of the Chancery, in the moots of the House.[76]
A Reader was appointed by Gray’s Inn, and great respect was paid to him. The Principal, accompanied by the Ancients and Gentlemen in Commons in their gowns, met him at the rails of the House on his coming, and conducted him into the Hall.
This is a delightful fifteenth-century building. The original timber and rough-cast exterior was cased in red brick in the eighteenth century. It has a high-pitched roof and louvre in the centre, and, within, an open timber roof, and some heraldic glass in the windows (1500). It stands in a small courtyard, beyond which there used to be another Court, wherein were the Library and Kitchen, and, beyond, houses grouped about a railed-in garden.
Portraits of Lord Chief Justice Holt, the most distinguished Principal, and of Lord Burghley, Bacon, Lord Keeper Coventry, and Charles II. once hung upon the walls. In 1854 the Society consisted of a Principal, nine Ancients, and five Companions. The Companions were chosen by the Principal and Ancients. The advantage ofbeing a Companion was, in the evidence given before the Royal Commission in 1855, stated to be ‘the dining’; the advantage of being an Ancient ‘dinners and some little fees.’ Barnard’s Inn is now the property of the Mercers’ Company, who moved their School hither in 1894. Only the Hall now (1909) remains of the old buildings. Even the passage from Holborn has been altered, and an imposing block of offices, fronting Holborn, is in course of erection, behind which lie the Hall and modern School buildings.
Furnival’s Inn, which Stow says belonged to Sir William Furnival and Thomasin, his wife, in the reign of Richard II., lay to the west of the Bishop of Ely’s Palace in Holborn. It was brought by the heiress of the Furnivals to the Earls of Shrewsbury, from whom it passed to the Society of Lincoln’s Inn, and was by them leased to the Principal and Fellows of the Inn of Chancery there inhabiting (1548).
Inigo Jones erected a building on this site in 1640, which was afterwards demolished. It was rebuilt in 1820, and the site is now occupied by part of the new offices of the Prudential Assurance Company. Of this Inn Sir Thomas More was Reader for more than three years, and here CharlesDickens wrote the ‘Pickwick Papers,’ and here he gave John Westlock chambers in ‘Martin Chuzzlewit.’ To Charles Dickens’s rooms in Furnival’s Inn came an artist seeking employment, who offered two or three drawings to illustrate ‘Pickwick,’ which the rising young author did not think suitable. This artist was William Makepeace Thackeray. A bust of Dickens by Percy Fitzgerald is placed within the entrance of the modern pink pile of offices.
Opposite Ely House, and adjoining Crookhorn Alley, stood Thavie’s Inn, which is another form, no doubt, of Davy’s Inn. It is spelt so in the early records, and the will of John Tavy (1348) mentions his hospice in St. Andrew, Holborn (see pp.5and39). The spelling ‘Tavy,’ I suppose, indicates the Welsh origin of this Mr. Davy. A John Davy occurs as holding lands in Holborn fifty years later. This Inn was also closely connected with Lincoln’s Inn.
Of the Inns of Chancery which were attached to the Inner Temple, only Clifford’s Inn survives, and its days are numbered. Lyon’s Inn, which is mentioned as an Inn of Chancery in King Henry V.’s time, lay between Old Wych Street and Holywell Street, and disappeared with them
THE GREAT HALL OF THE ROYAL COURTS OF JUSTICEStreet’snoble Gothic Hall, through which the Judges pass in dignified procession at the opening of the Courts after the Long Vacation.
THE GREAT HALL OF THE ROYAL COURTS OF JUSTICEStreet’snoble Gothic Hall, through which the Judges pass in dignified procession at the opening of the Courts after the Long Vacation.
THE GREAT HALL OF THE ROYAL COURTS OF JUSTICE
Street’snoble Gothic Hall, through which the Judges pass in dignified procession at the opening of the Courts after the Long Vacation.
in the course of the recent Strand improvements. Clement’s Inn took its name probably from ‘a fountain called St. Clement’s Well,’ which Stow describes (1603) as ‘North from the parish Church of S. Clement’s, and neare unto an Inn of Chancerie called Clement’s Inne; [it] is faire curbed square with hard stone, kept cleane for common use, and is alwayes full.’
The picturesque Queen Anne buildings of the Inn have disappeared, and in their place some more pretentious flats and offices have been erected. They looked out, until the beginning of 1909, upon a green open space, some two acres in extent, bounded by the Law Courts, Carey Street, and the Strand. A road runs under the Judges’ Rooms in the Law Courts from the Strand to a flight of steps, which lead up to Carey Street beneath ornamental arches. This space was intended to be covered by the Law Courts, according to the original design. But the estimates were cut down, and the block which was meant to cover this space was sacrificed. The inconvenience which has resulted for lawyers and litigants ever since has been the gain of the less litigious public. For, thanks to the generosity of the late Mr. W. H. Smith, the vacant place was laid out as a lawnand flower-garden, and has long formed a refreshing strip of greensward in the heart of this busy centre of London. Two-thirds of it have now been sacrificed, for the pressing need of more accommodation is at last to be met by the extension of the Law Courts, and the erection of four new Courts, which have been begun at the north-west end of this plot. The new building, designed to harmonize with Street’s somewhat bastard Gothic building, will be connected with it by a bridge of three arches spanning the walk between Carey Street and the Strand.
Clifford’s Inn still survives. It can be approached either from Chancery Lane, through Serjeants’ Inn, from Fetter Lane, or from Fleet Street. Out of the roar and bustle of that busy thoroughfare a passage leads up past the porch of St. Dunstan’s Church. On the north side of a tiny Court, from which an archway leads into a larger one, stands a tiny Hall, with a large clock and windows full of heraldic glass, amongst which the chequers of the Cliffords are conspicuous. This Hall in its present shape, re-cased and transmogrified, dates from 1797, but a fourteenth-century arch at the end of it points to pristine beauty.
A few separate houses are dotted irregularly about on the opposite side. But the chief charm of Clifford’s Inn lies in the green grass space and shady trees, a garden bounded by railings, and on two sides by old brick buildings, with deep cornices and tiled roofs, which forms so grateful a view from the interior of the Record Office, or from the Court of Serjeants’ Inn.
The Inn is called after Robert de Clifford, whose widow (1344) let the messuage to students of the law for £10 per annum. It was acquired by the Society at a rental of £4 towards the end of the fifteenth century. The Society was composed of the Principal and Rulers, and the Juniors or ‘Kentish Men.’ It would be of interest, if for no other reason, because Coke and Selden once resided here.
It was in Clifford’s Inn that Sir Matthew Hale and the other Commissioners sat to deal with the cases which arose after the Great Fire of London and the questions of boundaries and rebuilding.
Clifford’s Inn was always reckoned, except by its members, a dependency of the Inner Temple. No Inn of Court, at any rate, acquired its lease or freehold. Clifford’s Inn paid its own way, had its own customs, its great days, and peculiar rules. The most interesting of its old customs was a kindof grace, which used to be performed after dinner by a member of what was mysteriously called the Kentish Mess. The Chairman of this Mess, for which a special table was always provided, after bowing gravely to the Principal, took from a servitor four small loaves joined together in the shape of a cross. These he dashed upon the table before him three times, amid profound silence. The bread was then passed down to the last man in the Kentish Mess, who carried it from the Hall. A number of old women used to wait at the buttery to receive these crumbs which had fallen from the rich man’s table. The exact significance of the symbolism of this performance is not clear. It is probably the usual mixture of Pagan rites and Christian observance. Antiquaries, indeed, have suggested that ‘this singular custom typifies offerings to Ceres, who first taught mankind the use of laws, and originated those peculiar ornaments of civilization, their expounders, the lawyers.’[77]
Of the Inns attached to the Middle Temple, the Strand, or Chester’s Inn, so-called ‘for the nearnesse to the Bishop of Chester’s house’ (Stow), stood near the Church of St. Mary le Strand, without Temple Bar. It was pulled down by the Protector,Duke of Somerset, ‘who in place thereof raised that large and beautiful house, but yet unfinished, called Somerset house.’
Lastly, there was New Inn. In St. George’s Lane, near the Old Bailey, was an Inn of Chancery, whence the Society, Stow tells us, moved to ‘a common hostelry, called of the sign Our Lady Inne, not far from Clement’s Inne, and which they hold by the name of the New Inn, paying therefor £6 rent, for more cannot be gotten of them, and much less will they be put from it.’ (See40.)
This ‘New Inn,’ which lay west of Clement’s Inn, in Wych Street, has also disappeared. Here Sir Thomas More studied prior to his being admitted to Lincoln’s Inn.
Next to Serjeants’ Inn in Chancery Lane, and adjoining the garden of Clifford’s Inn, stood the House of the Converted Jews, founded by Henry III., in place of a Jew’s house forfeited to him (1233).
There were gathered a great number of converted Jews and Infidels, who were ‘ordayned and appointed, under an honest rule of life, sufficient maintenance,’ and who lived under a learned Christian appointed to govern them. As was thecase, however, with the similar House of Converts founded by Henry at Oxford, when all Jews were banished from the Kingdom in 1290, the number of converts naturally decayed, and the House was accordingly annexed by Patent to William Burstall, Clerk, Custos Rotulorum, or Keeper of the Rolls of the Chancery, in 1377. ‘This first Maister of the Rolles was sworne in Westminster Hall at the Table of Marble Stone; since the which time, that house hath beene commonly called the Rolles in Chancerie Lane.’ So the invaluable Stow, who adds that Jewish converts continued none the less to be relieved there.
Henry III. also built for his Converts ‘a fair Church,’ afterwards ‘used and called the Chapel for the custody of Rolls and Records of Chancerie.’ The fabric of Rolls Chapel, after being frequently rebuilt, had ceased to have any merit. It was demolished when the recent additions to the Record Office were made (1895), and when to the vast Gothic Tower, designed by Pennethorne, the section facing Chancery Lane was added. This building, in spite of its feeble minarets and decadent, nondescript ornamentation, often, by virtue of its mass and handsome material, looks extremely effective, especially when London sun, shining through London mist, dimlysuffuses its pearly domes with delicate pinks and yellows.
Upon the site of Rolls Chapel a Museum of equal size has been built, which the present Deputy Keeper of the Records, Sir Henry Maxwell Lyte, has made so interesting a feature of our National Archives. In this Museum of the Public Record Office, three large monuments, once in the Rolls Chapel, have been re-erected, two of them in their former positions. They are of great interest and beauty. Chief among them is the Tomb of Dr. Young, who was Dean of York and Master of the Rolls (died 1516). This beautiful terra-cotta monument is ascribed to Torrigiano, who made the splendid tomb in Henry VII.’s Chapel. Here, too, are the monuments, in alabaster, of Sir Richard Allington (died 1561), and of Edward Bruce, Lord Kinlosse, Master of the Rolls, who died in 1611.
Amongst other Masters who were buried in Rolls Chapel, Pennant mentions Sir John Strange, but without the quibbling line—