As is 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 aristocratic monopoly. 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 preparing to 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’s Inn 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 wisdom and 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 do not stand for Perhaps John Thomas, or Perhaps 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. It was 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

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 of being 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 Charles Dickens 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. 5 and 39). 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

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 lawn and 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 kind of 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.’ (See 40.)

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 the case, 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, dimly suffuses 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—

Bishop Butler’s ‘Sermons at the Rolls’ and the fame of Bishop Atterbury and Bishop Burnet keep alive the memory of the office of ‘Preacher at the Rolls,’ an office held also by the late Dr. Brewer, whose name is famous in the annals of historical research. As to Bishop Burnet, the story runs that, in 1684, he preached here upon the text, ‘Save me from the lion’s mouth, for Thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns’ (Ps. xxii. 21), and was promptly dismissed for a sermon supposed to be levelled at the Royal Arms.

Seven panels of heraldic glass have been transferred from the old Chapel to the new windows of the Museum, and some fragments of a fine chancel arch of the thirteenth century, found in the East wall, are there preserved. In the Museum a series of Documents of historical interest are exhibited, ranging from Domesday Book to the Coronation Roll of Queen Victoria. One of the most interesting, perhaps, of the many autographs is the suggestive signature of Guy Fawkes before and after he had been examined by torture.[78]

In view of the origin of this House of the Rolls, it is interesting to note that Jews began to be admitted to the Bar at the beginning of last century. In 1833 Mr. (afterwards Sir) Francis

Goldsmid was ‘called’ at Lincoln’s Inn, and Sir George Jessel in 1847. The latter, in 1873, succeeded Lord Romilly as Master of the Rolls, and Keeper of those Records which are stored upon the site of the House founded for the maintenance of converted Jews and Infidels.