The Inns of Court. Cecil Headlam

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       Cecil Headlam

      The Inns of Court

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4064066232306

Table of Contents

       THE INNS OF COURT

       CHAPTER I ORIGIN OF THE INNS

       CHAPTER II THE KNIGHTS TEMPLARS AND THEIR SUCCESSORS

       CHAPTER III THE TEMPLE CHURCH

       CHAPTER IV THE MIDDLE TEMPLE

       CHAPTER V THE INNER TEMPLE

       CHAPTER VI LINCOLN’S INN AND THE DEVIL’S OWN

       CHAPTER VII GRAY’S INN

       CHAPTER VIII INNS OF CHANCERY

       CHAPTER IX THE SERJEANTS AND SERJEANTS’ INNS

       APPENDIX

       INDEX

THE INNS OF COURT

       Table of Contents

CHAPTER I

       ORIGIN OF THE INNS

       Table of Contents

      The features of every ancient City are marked with the wrinkles and the scars of Time. The narrow lanes, the winding streets, the huddled houses, the blind alleys form, as it were, the furrows upon her aged countenance. They contribute enormously to the charm and beauty of her riper years, for they point to a life rich in experience and varied reminiscences. But, like other wrinkles, they have their drawbacks. As the bottle-neck of Bond Street, which blocks the traffic half the season, is the direct topographical result of the river which once flowed thereabouts, so the boundary of the property of the Knights Templars, marked by the Inner and Middle Temple Gateways, imposes the southern limit of Fleet Street, opposite to Street’s Gothic pile of Law Courts and to Chancery Lane. Hence the narrowness of that famous street, and the consequent congestion of traffic on the main route to the City. Then come the Beauty Doctors, who smooth out the old wrinkles, and broaden the ancient, narrow lines, which Time has cut so deeply on the face of the Town. The old landmarks are removed, and Wren’s gateways and buildings must disappear in order that broad, straight paths be driven right to the sanctuary of Business.

      And yet the old influences and the effects of historic movements and historic events persist, and will persist. It may seem far-fetched to say that everyone whose business or pleasure takes him to Fleet Street is directly subject to the influence of the Crusades. Yet it is so. But for those strange wars of mingled religious enthusiasm and commercial aggression, there would have been no Templars, and had there been no Templars, the whole nomenclature and topographical arrangement of this part of London would have been different; for the Societies of Lawyers, who succeeded to their property, succeeded, of course, to the boundaries of the messuages, as to the Round Church of the Knights Templars.

      Of the Temple, and the Templars, and their successors, we shall deal more at length in their proper places. It will be convenient first to consider what these Societies of Lawyers were and are, how they arose, and why they settled in the particular vicinity wherein they have chosen to set their ‘dusty purlieus.’

      William the Conqueror had established the Law Courts in his Palace. The great officers of State and the Barons were the Judges of this King’s Court—Aula Regis—which developed into three distinct divisions: King’s Bench and Common Pleas, under a Chief Justice, and Exchequer, where a Chief Baron presided to try all causes relating to the royal revenue. It was the business of a Norman King to ride about the country settling the affairs of the realm, which was his estate, and administering justice. The great Court of Justice, therefore, naturally accompanied the King in all his progresses, and suitors were obliged to follow and to find him, travelling for that purpose from all parts of the country to London, to Exeter, or to York.

      It was a system that was found ‘cumbersome, painful, and chargeable to the people,’ as Stow[1] puts it, and one of the provisions of Magna Charta accordingly enacted that the Court of Common Pleas should no longer follow the King, but be held in some determined place. The place determined was Westminster. The Court was held, though not at first, in the famous Hall, which William Rufus had erected and Richard II. rebuilt.

      It was to be expected that the fixing of the Courts would be followed by the settlement of ‘Students in the Law and the Ministers of each Court,’[2] as Dugdale has it, somewhere near at hand. Advocates had been drawn at first from the ranks of the clergy. This was natural enough, seeing that they formed the only educated class of the day. Nullus clericus nisi causidicus, the historian complains. It was equally natural that in the course of time objection should be taken to the spectacle of the professors of Christianity wrangling at the Bar, and monopolizing the power born of legal knowledge. Dugdale notes the first instance of an attempt to check their presence in the Courts as occurring at the beginning of the reign of Henry III. The clergy were at length excluded from practising in the Civil Courts, and a privileged class of lay Lawyers came into existence. Edward I. specially appointed the Justices of the Court of Common Pleas to ‘ordain from every County certain Attorneys and Lawyers of the best and most apt for their learning and skill, who might do service to his Court and People, and who alone should follow his Court and transact affairs therein.’

      And at this date, or shortly after it, we may assume that ‘students in the University of the Laws’[3] began to congregate in Hostels, or Inns, of Court, in order to study as ‘apprentices’ in the Guild of Law. For, as at Oxford or Cambridge, an Inn, or Hostel of residence, was the natural necessary requirement of such students when they began to come in numbers to sit at the feet of their teachers, the Masters of Law. The earliest mention of an Inn for housing apprentices of the Law occurs in 1344, in a demise from the Lady Clifford of the house near Fleet Street, called Clifford’s Inn, to the apprenticiis de banco, the lawyers belonging to the Court of Common Pleas. And Thavie’s Inn was similarly leased from one John Thavie, ‘a worthy citizen and armourer,’ of London, who died in 1348. In such hostels, leased to the senior members, voluntary associations, or guilds of teachers and learners of law would congregate, and gradually evolve their own regulations and customs.

      Other references occur to the ‘apprentices in hostels’ during this same reign (Edward III.). And from about this date the four Inns of Court—Gray’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn, and the Inner and Middle Temple—‘which are almost coincident in antiquity, similar in constitution, and identical in purpose,’[4] begin to emerge from the mists of