The Inns of Court. Cecil Headlam

that all the Inns of Court and Chancery cluster about the borders of the City Ward called Faringdon Without, and were once placed, as old Sir John Fortescue observed, ‘in the suburbs, out of the noise and turmoil of the City.’

      The Lawyers were thus conveniently placed between the seat of judicature at Westminster and the centre of business in the City of London, and secured the advantage of ‘ready access to the one and plenty of provisions in the other.’ In the wall which bounds the Temple Gardens upon the modern Embankment of the Thames is set a stone which marks the western boundary of the Liberty of the City and the spot where Queen Victoria received the City Sword (1900); the old Bar of the City, which took its name from the Temple, and

      MIDDLE TEMPLE LANE

      The overhanging buildings just inside Sir Christopher Wren’s Gateway in Fleet Street (see p. 67).

      Holborn Bar, marked the limit farther north. It is to be remembered that this famous Temple Bar did not mark the boundary of the City proper, but only of the later extension known as the Liberty of the City, and the Temple buildings within the Bar were yet without the narrower boundary of the City.

      Temple Bar consisted originally of a post, rails, and chain. Next, a house of timber was erected across the street, with a narrow gateway and entry on the south side under the house.[5] This was superseded about 1670 by the stone gate-house, designed by Christopher Wren, which was the scene of so many historic pageants when Lord Mayors have received their Sovereigns, and presented to them the keys of the City. It was here, notably, that the Lord Mayor delivered the City sword to good Queen Bess when she rode to St. Paul’s to return thanks for the victory over the Spanish Armada. Hereon, as upon London Bridge, the heads of famous criminals or rebels were stuck to warn the passers-by; and in the pillory here stood Titus Oates and Daniel de Foe—the latter for publishing his scandalous and seditious pamphlet, ‘The Shortest Way with the Dissenters.’ The citizens, however, pelted De Foe, not with rotten eggs, but with flowers. This noble gate-house was removed when the Strand was widened and the new Law Courts erected. It was rebuilt at Meux Park, Waltham Cross, and its original site is marked by a column surmounted by a griffin, representing the City arms (1880).

      It would appear that the Lawyers in choosing sites just outside the City boundaries for the Inns of their University were further influenced by the ordinance of Henry III. (1234), which enjoined the Mayor and Sheriffs to see to it that ‘no man should set up Schools of Law within the City.’ The object of this prohibition is a matter of dispute; Stubbs, for instance, maintaining that it applied to Canon Law, and others[6] that only Civil Law was intended, the object being to confine the clergy to the Theology and Canon Law, which seemed more properly their province.

      By the middle of the fourteenth century, then, we find the students of what we may call a London University of National Law established in their Inns or Hostels, which clustered about the boundaries of the City, from Holborn to Chancery Lane, from Fleet Street to the River. The Schools of Law, of which this University was composed, were distinctively English, and the University itself developed upon the peculiarly English lines of a College system, closely similar to that of Oxford and Cambridge. The Inns of Court and Chancery were the Colleges of Lawyers in the London University of Jurisprudence.

      Here dwelt, and here were trained for the Courts those guilds or fraternities of Lawyers, according to a scheme of oral and practical education which they gradually evolved. Trade Guilds were the basis of medieval social life, and medieval Universities were, in fact, nothing more nor less than Guilds of Study.[7] The four Inns of Court survive to-day as instances of the old Guilds of Law in London, and the lawyers, in their relations with the Courts, the public and solicitors, seem to represent still a highly organized Trade Union.

      The Inns of Court, then, have always exhibited, and still retain, the salient features of a University based upon the procedure of the medieval Guild. Just as, in other Universities, no one was allowed to teach until he had served an apprenticeship of terms, and, having been duly approved by the Masters of their Art, had received his degree or diploma of teaching; just as no butcher or tailor was allowed to ply his trade until he had qualified himself and had been duly approved by the Masters of his Guild, so in the Masters of these Guilds of Law was vested the monopoly of granting the legal degree, or call to practise at the Bar, to apprentices who had served a stipulated term of study and passed the ordeal of certain oral and practical preparation. And as though to emphasize beyond dispute the Collegiate nature of these Societies, we find that each one of them made haste to provide itself with buildings and surroundings, which still present to us, in the midst of the dirt and turmoil of busy London, something of the charm and seclusion and self-sufficiency of an Oxford College, with its Hall and Chapel, its residential buildings, its Library, and grassy quadrangles, and its Gateway to insure its privacy.

      The same system of discipline, of celibate life, of a common Hall, of residence in community, and of compulsory attendance at the services of the Church, which marked the ordinary life of a medieval University, was repeated at the Inns of Court.

      And the kind of Collegiate Order into which they shaped themselves was also shown by the several grades existing within the Societies themselves. The word ‘barrister’ itself perpetuates the ancient discipline of the Inns, where the dais of the governing body, or Benchers, corresponding to the High Table of an Oxford College, was separated by a bar from the profane crowd of the Hall. The Halls of the Inns were not only the scenes of that business of eating and drinking, the ‘dinners’ to which so much attention was devoted, and by which the students ‘eat their way to the Bench,’ but also the centres of the social life and educational system of these Guilds.

      Dugdale gives at length the degrees of Tables in the Halls of the Inns—the Benchers’ Tables, the tables of the Utter Barristers, the tables of the Inner-Bar, and the Clerks’ Commons, and, without the screen, the Yeoman’s Table for Benchers’ Clerks.

      The Utter- or Outer Barristers ranked next to the Benchers. They were the advanced students who, after they had attained a certain standing, were called from the body of the Hall to the first place outside the bar for the purpose of taking part in the moots or public debates on points of law. The Inner Barristers assembled near the centre of the Hall.

      ‘For the space of seven years or thereabouts,’ says Stow, ‘they frequent readings, meetings, boltinges, and other learned exercises, whereby growing ripe in the knowledge of the lawes, and approved withal to be of honest conversation, they are either by the general consent of the Benchers or Readers, being of the most auncient, grave and iudiciall men of everie Inn of the Court, or by the special priviledge of the present Reader there, selected and called to the degree of Utter Barristers, and so enabled to be Common Counsellors, and to practise the law, both in their Chambers, and at the Barres.’

      Readers, to help the younger students, were chosen from the Utter Barristers. From the Utter Barristers, too, were chosen by the Benchers ‘the chiefest and best learned’ to increase the number of the Bench and to be Readers there also. After this ‘second reading’ the young Barrister was named an Apprentice at the Law, and might be advanced at the pleasure of the Prince, as Stow says, to the place of Serjeant, ‘and from the number of Serjeants also the void places of Judges are likewise ordinarily filled.’ ‘From thenceforth they hold not any roome in those Innes of Court, being translated to the Serjeants’ Innes, where none but the Serjeants and Judges do converse’ (Stow, i., pp. 78, 79).

      Upon the Benchers, or Ancients, devolved the government of the Inn, and from their number a treasurer was chosen annually.

      Readings and Mootings would seem to have been the chief forms of legal training provided by the Societies, and they may be said roughly to represent the theoretical and practical side of their system of education. As to Readings, the procedure in general was as follows: Every year the Benchers chose two Readers, who entered upon their duties to the accompaniment of the most elaborate ceremonial and feasting. Then upon certain solemn occasions it was the duty of one of them to deliver a lecture upon some statute rich in nice points of law. The Reader would first explain the whole