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The end of the Age of Innocence?

Inns of Court, London

Entrance Lincoln's Inn

One of the hidden treasures of London which are largely unknown to visitors are the urban villages in the midst the bustling city known as the Inns of Court. Based, like the old universities on monastic foundations the have rooms, colleges, beautiful gardens, Halls, Chapels and Commons for Students, members and Benchers. Originally the law civil and cannon was the province of clergy and conducted in Latin. Today there are not impoverished students in these lodgings but Lawyers at the other end of the scale and because they are private organisations these Inns have been conserved and sensitively renewed to give a tranquil sense of enclosure and an atmosphere of being a place apart. You can stroll almost two miles from the northern boundary at Theoboald’s Road of Gray’s Inn right down to the River Thames at the Middle Temple through these legal villages with adjoining streets with Barristers Chambers and solicitors offices, legal publishers and services, the Courts of Law on the Strand, and the other services required to keep lawyers lubricated such as special bank branches, restaurants and many, many excellent hostelleries!




Cittie of Yorke pub Holborn

A stunning example of Gothic architecture, London's Inns of Court date back to before the 14th century. It is here that barristers train and traditionally practice. Located conveniently adjacent to the Royal Courts of Justice, the Inns are divided up into Lincoln's Inn, Gray's Inn, Inner Temple and Middle Temple. Each Inn covers several acres and comprises of a great hall, chapel, libraries, sets of chambers and gardens. Public access is limited, although visitors can tour the grounds and gardens during the week.






Bedford Row

Adjoining the Inns are many other Georgian enclaves of which my own favourite is Bedford Row in Holborn. In spite of some rebuilding, this is among the best in London for the surviving buildings of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Built on the Duke of Bedford’s Estate the main developer of this street was Nicholas Barbon, probably the most important of the building speculators in London during the last quarter of the 17th century. With its mews of Jockey’s Fields it is a pristine enclave where even the street furniture is of a high quality. It is book ended by two “Red” telephone boxes – themselves of some architectural interest as they were designed by Giles Gilbert Scott and are modelled on Sir Joan Soane’s tomb less than a mile away in St. Pancras church yard. There is even one of the last (non functioning) public water pumps in London.





The legal profession in England and Wales is made up of two separate groups - barristers and solicitors. A barrister is a lawyer who has been admitted by one of the four Inns of Court to "plead at the bar" (address the court), after having spent a year in pupillage with a practicing barrister and passing a “bar exam”. A solicitor (though qualified in the law) is, however, rarely allowed “rights of access” to the court and must usually instruct a barrister to present their client’s case to the court for them, although this is changing.



The Inns of Court, which date from before the 14th century, were originally eating and lodging places for students of the law. Though there are references throughout history to over 30 different Inns, only four survive. These are Lincoln’s, Gray’s, Inner Temple and Middle Temple. Each has its own colour: Green for Lincoln’s, black for each Temple (because the knights templar were a religious order) and red for Gray’s. They still offer accommodation and food, however only a few privileged judges and senior barristers have rooms there and these are mainly used only during week days.



The term “being called to the bar” refers to young barristers being allowed to practice: they are only permitted to do so after having eaten 24 dinners in one of the Inns, a tradition dating back centuries. This is because attending the dinners provides a student with an opportunity to mix with qualified colleagues and understand the traditions of “the bar”, such as never shaking hands with a fellow barrister. Barristers are not supposed to discuss fees directly with the solicitors who instruct them, and the flap at the back of their gowns is supposedly where, in days of old, solicitors used to slip their payments. Indeed the black cloak itself was originally worn in mourning for Queen Anne and the horse hair wigs were also originally black and worn in protest at the execution of Charles the First. Even today barristers “right of audience” derives from their position as “amicus curiae” – friends of the court – and they have no legal entitlement to sue for fees as you cannot have a contract with a barrister.






Church Gray's Inn

The four Inns of Court have the exclusive right to Call men and women to the Bar - i.e. to admit those who have fulfilled the necessary qualifications to the degree of Barrister-at-Law, which entitles them, after a period of pupillage (vocational training) either to practise as independent advocates in the Courts of England and Wales or to take employment in government or local government service, industry, commerce or finance. Thus, to qualify as a barrister, everyone must join an Inn and keep a qualifying session on at least 12 occasions. The government of each Inn is ultimately controlled by the Masters of the Bench, elected mainly from among its members who are also senior members of the judiciary or Queen's Counsel.




Law Courts on the Strand

Barristers organise themselves in “Chambers” literally after the rooms they rented in an Inn and under their rules must work on the “taxi rank principle” that is take cases as they come along and not pick and choose. Today the Chambers tend to specialise in particular areas of law so your Solicitor engages a barrister from a Chamber with particular expertise. The Chambers themselves are sophisticated businesses with pupils, administration, and paralegal and research staff. The highest ranked (and most expensive barristers) are QC’s (Queen’s Councils) and the names of all the barristers trading at a Chamber are listed at the door. When a barrister is appointed to the judiciary they can no longer trade as a barrister because of conflict of interest but they then become “door tenants” to maintain their connection with the chamber.

The four Inns of Court - Middle Temple, Inner Temple, Gray's Inn and Lincoln's Inn - were traditionally the bastions of the legal establishment in England which controls admission to the Bar. Now they are run like more like clubs. The Inns of Chancery were related to the Inns of Court, involved in the education of legal students, but they were lesser establishments than the Inns of Court as they had no right to call students to the Bar.


Gray's Inn

Dugdale (Origines Juridiciales) states that the learned in English law were anciently persons in holy orders, the justices of the king's court being bishops, abbots and the like. But in 1207 the clergy were prohibited by canon from acting in the temporal courts. The result proving prejudicial to the interests of the community, a commission of inquiry was issued by Edward I. (1290), and this was followed up (1292) by a second commission, which among other things directed that students "apt and eager" should be brought from the provinces and placed in proximity to the courts of law now fixed by Magna Carta at Westminster. These students were accordingly located in what became known as the Inns of Court and Chancery, the latter designated by Fortescue (De Laudibus) as "the earliest settled places for students of the law," the germ of what Sir Edward Coke subsequently spoke of as our English juridical university.



In these Inns of Court and Chancery, thus constituted, and corresponding to the ordinary college, the students, according to Fortescue, not only studied the laws and divinity, but further learned to dance, sing and play instrumental music, "so that these hostels, being nurseries or seminaries of the court, were therefore called Inns of Court." Stow in his Survey (1598) says: "There is in and about this city a whole university, as it were, of students, practisers or pleaders and judges of the laws of this realm"; and he goes on to enumerate the several societies, fourteen in number, then existing, corresponding nearly with those recognized in the present day, of which the Inns of Court, properly so-called, are and always have been four, namely Lincoln's Inn, the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple and Gray's Inn.


Lincoln's Inn

The Inns of Chancery were related to the Inns of Court, involved in the education of legal students, but they were lesser establishments than the Inns of Court as they had no right to call students to the Bar. There importance declined during the eighteenth century, and all but two vanished completely during the nineteenth century. The Inns of Chancery were:

Barnard's Inn, originally known as Mackworth's Inn.

Clements’s Inn. Named from the nearby St Clement Dane, Clement's Inn sat on the north side of the Strand. The buildings had all been demolished by 1891.

Furnival's Inn. Dating from medieval times, this Inn of Chancery was run by Lincoln's Inn until 1817 when it declined to renew the lease and Furnival's Inn was dissolved. The ancient building was subsequently torn down and the new building erected on the spot took the name Furnival's Inn although it retained no association with the Inns of Chancery or of court.





New Inn. This inn which sat on an area of land now partly covered by Australia House was originally a tavern called the Inn of Our Lady. It was converted into an Inn of chancery by students from an St George's Inn (an Inn of chancery) which had fallen into much disrepair. In the early seventeenth century Middle Temple acquired the freehold, which was then compulsorily acquired by London City Council for its Kingsway Improvement Scheme in 1899.

Staple Inn. This inn still survives, hidden behind a facade of shops on the south side of Holborn. Originally a wool house - thus the name Staple - it became an Inn of Chancery in 1378. it went into decline during the nineteenth century and was sold between 1884-1886.


Fountain Court

Strand Inn. Situated on the south side of the Strand opposite St Mary-le-Strand and formerly known as Chester Inn as the land had once belonged to the Bishop of Chester. It was demolished in 1549 to make was for Somerset House.

Thavies Inn. Named after a fourteenth-century armourer called John Thavies, the inn became attached to Lincoln's Inn some time before 1422. Lincoln's Inn subsequently purchased the freehold, but failed to renew the lease in the 1760s and Thavies Inn was subsequently dissolved.





There were also other 'inns', literally accommodation for lawyers, although informal teaching and tutoring almost certainly would have been done within them. One example is Serjeant's Inn, Chancery Lane.

Originally the bar was the railing that enclosed the judge in a court. Legal practitioners had to argue their case 'before the bar', that is, before the judge. The term "the bar" came to mean all those qualified and authorised to conduct the trial of legal cases in court.



The Inns of Court were familiar to Dickens from boyhood and there are numerous references to them in his novels. On leaving school, Dickens was employed as a clerk by a solicitor who had an office in Gray's Inn and it is hardly surprising that he chose that location for the chambers of Mr Pickwick's junior counsel, Mr Phunky, in the case of Bardell v. Pickwick. The author started work on 'Pickwick Papers' whilst he was renting rooms in Furnival's Inn, on nearby High Holborn. At that time he was working as a reporter on the Morning Chronicle.



While Gray's Inn still exists - albeit altered by bomb damage during the Second World War - Furnival's Inn was pulled down in the late nineteenth century. Its site is commemorated, though, by a plaque set into the wall of the large block of red buildings erected there by the Prudential Assurance Company. There is also a bust of Charles Dickens in the courtyard (Waterhouse Square, 142 Holborn Bars, EC1).

Just across the road from the Prudential building is the former Barnard's Inn, a collection of buildings now owned by the Mercers' Company. The company has redeveloped the site, but in Dickens' day, it had fallen into disrepair. He describes it scathingly in Chapter 21 of 'Great Expectations’; when he has Mr Pip arrive there as a callow country lad fresh up to the city from Rochester. Poor Pip had innocently: "supposed the establishment to be an hotel kept by Mr Barnard, to which the Blue Boar in our town was a mere public house, whereas I now found Barnard to be a disembodied spirit or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for tom cats."



Also close by is Staple Inn, hidden to view behind a neat row of black and white half-timbered houses which date from the sixteenth century. The arched stone gateway under the houses still leads to the 'little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles' as described by Dickens in Chapter 11 of 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 put 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. Moreover, it is one of those nooks which are legal nooks; and it contains a little Hall, with a little lantern in its roof: to what obstructive purposes devoted, and at whose expense, this history knoweth not." The 'little hall' is still to be seen although it is not officially open to visitors.



Staple Inn features again in Bleak House, where it is given as a favourite walk for Mr Snagsby. Of all the Inns of Court that Dickens mentions, probably the best preserved is Middle Temple. Set back from the embankment on a wide expanse of green, Middle Temple somehow manages to retain all the gravitas of a great legal institution within the precincts of what feels like a little village. With its winding alleys intricately laced between cool squares, stepping in to Middle Temple really is like stepping back in time. All of which makes it the perfect backdrop for a novel and, of course, Dickens uses the setting several times.

A very apposite description of the Temple as Dickens found it more than a century ago and very much as it is still to be found today, is given in Barnaby Rudge.

Chapter 15

"There are, still, worse places than the Temple, on a sultry day, for basking in the sun, or resting idly in the shade. There is yet a drowsiness in its courts, and a dreamy dullness in its trees and gardens; those who pace its lanes and squares may yet hear the echoes of their footsteps on the sounding stones, and read upon its gates, in passing from the tumult of the Strand or Fleet Street, 'Who enters here leaves noise behind.' There is still the plash of falling water in fair Fountain Court, and there are yet nooks and corners where dun-haunted students may look down from their dusty garrets, on a vagrant ray of sunlight patching the shade of the tall houses, and seldom troubled to reflect a passing stranger's form. There is yet, in the Temple, something of a clerkly monkish atmosphere, which public offices of law have not disturbed, and even legal firms have failed to scare away. In summer time, its pumps suggest to thirsty idlers, springs cooler, and more sparkling, and deeper than other wells; and as they trace the spillings of full pitchers on the heated ground, they snuff the freshness, and, sighing, cast sad looks towards the Thames, and think of baths and boats, and saunter on, despondent."



It is in the Middle Temple where we are introduced to Mr Chester. He is seated in Paper Buildings, which can still be seen.

"It was in a room in Paper Buildings - a row of goodly tenements, shaded in front by ancient trees, and looking, at the back, upon the Temple Gardens - that his, our idler, lounged; now taking up again the paper he had laid down a hundred times; now trifling with the fragments of his meal; now pulling forth his golden toothpick, and glancing leisurely about the room, or out at window into the trim garden walks, where a few early loiterers were already pacing to and fro."


Templar Knights on horseback

References to the Middle Temple are peppered about the works of Dickens, but perhaps the most memorable of them is made in Martin Chuzzlewit, when the author uses Fountain Court as the regular meeting point for Ruth Pinch and her brother, Tom.

Grays Inn




Gray's Inn Gardens



There has been law teaching on this site since the reign of Edward III. The London residence of the De Grey family, who had strong links with the Wales and Chester Circuit, was the Manor of Purpoole, where a number of lawyers and their families came to live and work and formed the Honourable Society of Gray's Inn. The Inn flourished under the first Elizabeth. The Hall was completed at the beginning of her reign and anyone who was anyone at her Court joined Gray's. The 'Armada' screen in the Hall may have been partly made from the timbers of the Spanish ship 'Nuestra Senora del Rosario' and donated by the Lord High Admiral of England, Howard of Effingham, who was a member.

The Inner Temple

The recorded history of the area known as the Temple begins in about 1160 when it was acquired by the Knights of the Military Order of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, who moved their London base there from the Old Temple site in Holborn. Following the loss of the Holy Land in the 1290s, the Order of the Temple declined and in 1312 was dissolved, after the Knights had been arrested and imprisoned at the instigation of Pope Clement V for alleged malpractice. The Templars estates were granted by the Pope to the Knights of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem and, although the New Temple was seized initially by Edward II as forfeit to the Crown, the King conceded the consecrated portion and subsequently the whole site to the Hospitallers.

The Inner Temple, comprising a hall, parliament chamber, library and other buildings, occupies the site of the ancient mansion of the Knights Templars, built about the year 1240, and has from time to time been more or less rebuilt and extended, the present handsome range of buildings, including a new dining hall, being completed in 1870. The library owes its existence to William Petyt, keeper of the Tower Records in the time of Queen Anne, who was also a benefactor to the library of the Middle Temple.



The Inner Temple Library provides a service for Inner Temple barristers and students and for barrister members of the other Inns of Court. Facilities include a reference library of over 100,000 volumes of English law.




Lincoln's Inn Fields

Lincoln's Inn Fields evolved from two waste grounds that had been playgrounds for students of nearby Lincoln's Inn since the 14th century. It was London's first garden square, though it was originally a public execution site. In the 17th century, it was an exclusive area to live in. However, the only houses remaining from this time (around 1641) are at no 59 and 60. Since 1894, the gardens have been open to the public. Alleged to be the fictional home of Charles Dickens' Little Nell, the building housing the Old Curiosity Shop in Portsmouth Street was built in 1567. It is now a listed building and thought to be the oldest shop in London.


Old Curiosity Shop




Sir John Soane's museum

Sir John Soane's museum is in a house he left to the nation in 1837. Soane was one of Britain's leading architects and the designer of the Bank of England building. He lived at no 13 and before he died, secured an Act of Parliament ensuring that on his death the house and its contents would be left intact as a public museum. The museum contains a variety of objects ranging from paintings, manuscripts, pottery, antique marbles, books, scold's bridles, shackles, pistols belonging to Napoleon and more.




Great Hall Lincoln's Inn

Lincoln's Inn

In the heart of Central London lies Lincoln's Inn, a haven from the roar of traffic and crowded pavements. The Inn occupies most of the rectangle formed by High Holborn on the north, Carey Street and the Royal Courts of Justice on the south, Chancery Lane on the east and Lincoln's Inn Fields on the west. Indeed, if one excludes the frontage to High Holborn and the south-eastern block, the eleven acres of the Inn comprise virtually all that remains. The Inn is old, very old; but it is no mere relic. It houses a living, functional body of public importance, the Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn. ''Lincoln's Inn'' is thus a term which describes both the place and the Society which inhabits it. Fifteen Prime Ministers, including Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher, have been members of Lincolns Inn.






Church Lincoln's Inn

Lincoln's Inn stands on the site partly of an episcopal palace erected in the time of Henry III. by Ralph Nevill, bishop of Chichester and Chancellor of England, and partly of a religious house, called Black Friars House, in Holborn. In the reign of Edward II., Henry Lacy, earl of Lincoln, possessed the place, which from him acquired the name of Lincoln's Inn, probably becoming an Inn of Court soon after his death (in 1310), though of its existence as a place of legal study there is little authentic record until the time of Henry VI. (1424). The fee simple of the inn would appear to have remained vested in the see of Chichester; and it was not until 1580 that the society which for centuries had occupied the inn as tenants acquired the absolute ownership of it. The old hall, built about 1506, still remains, but has given place to a Victorian Gothic Revival structure designed by Philip Hardwick, R.A., which, along with the buildings containing the library, was completed in 1845.

Middle Temple

No precise date can be given for the establishment of the Middle Temple, or for that matter of the other three Inns of Court, though it is likely that the four Inns had come into being by the middle of the 14th century. The Inn's name derives from the Knights Templar who were in possession of the site we now call the Temple for some 150 years. The origins of the Inn trace from two roots: the occupation of the Knights and the replacement of priestly lawyers by a lay profession.



The Middle Temple possesses in its hall one of the stateliest of existing Elizabethan buildings. Commenced in 1562, under the auspices of Edmund Plowden, then treasurer, it was not completed until 1572, the richly carved screen at the east end in the style of the Renaissance being put up in 1575. The belief that the screen was constructed of timber taken from ships of the Spanish Armada {1588) is baseless. The hall, which has been preserved unaltered, has been the scene of numerous historic incidents, notably the entertainments given within its walls to regal and other personages from Queen Elizabeth downwards.



The Temple Church is one of the most historic and beautiful churches in London. It incorporates eight hundred years of history: from the Crusaders in the 12th century, through the turmoil of the Reformation and the founding father of Anglican theology.
The Temple Church in London, famed for its rare circular nave called "the Round," was built by the Knights Templar in the 12th century. It is one of only three Norman round churches left in England. In the mid-12th century, the Knights Templar or Red Knights (so called after the red crosses they wore) had their London headquarters at a site in High Holborn. But by the 1160s, the order outgrew the original site and purchased property near Fleet Street for establishment of a larger monastic compound.






The Temple Church

The Temple Church was consecrated on February 10, 1185 in a ceremony conducted by Heraclius, the Crusader Patriarch of Jerusalem. King Henry II may have been present at the consecration. The Knights Templar held worship services and their secret initiation rites in "the Round," the oldest part of the Temple Church. The church was originally part of a large monastic compound that included residences, military training facilities, and recreational grounds for the military brethren and novices, who were not permitted to go into the city without the permission of the Master of the Temple.

The order of the Knights Templar was very powerful in England in this early period. The Master of the Temple sat in parliament as primus baro (the first baron of the realm). The Temple compound was regularly used as a residence by kings and by legates of the Pope. The temple also served as an early depository bank, sometimes in defiance of the Crown's wishes to seize the funds of nobles who had entrusted their wealth there. The Temple was the scene of important negotiations leading to the signing of Magna Carta in 1215. Instrumental in these negotiations was William Marshal, whose effigy is in the Round.



The original church had a small choir, but this was greatly enlarged in the early 1200s when King Henry III expressed a wish to be buried there. The new chancel was consecrated on Ascension Day 1240. However, when Henry's will was read upon his death in 1272, it was discovered he had changed his mind and wanted to be buried in Westminster Abbey instead.

Having started out poor, holy, and dedicated to the protection of pilgrims, the Knights Templar grew rich from showers of royal gifts. Their popularity waned until, in the 14th century, they were charged with heresy, blasphemy, and sodomy, thrown into the Tower of London, and stripped of their wealth. With the suppression of the Templars, the Knights of Malta

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/03/knights-of-malta.html

obtained control of the property.

In Part I of the 16th century play Henry VI, by William Shakespeare, the Temple Church is the scene of the start of the 15th century Wars of the Roses. In the play, the war was sparked by the plucking of two roses in the Temple garden. In 2002, the Shakespearian tradition was commemorated with the planting of new white and red roses in the modern gardens. Later, law professors who worked in the area began to rent a portion of the space; in the early 1600s King James I granted control of the complex to their societies. Each section of The Temple - Inner Temple and Middle Temple - has its own halls, gardens, courts, and library collections, but the Temple Church is held in common by both.


Charles Lamb's lodgings

The Temple Church survived the Great Fire of London (1666) unscathed, but received restorations anyway by Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723). In 1841, the walls and ceiling of the church were renovated in the Victorian Gothic style. On May 10, 1941, during the height of the Battle of Britain in World War II, a German air raid of incendiary bombs severely damaged the Temple Church. The roof of the Round Church caught fire, which quickly spread to the nave and chancel. All the wooden parts of the church, including the Victorian renovations, were destroyed. After the war, the Temple Church was fully restored; it was rededicated on November 1958.

The Temple Church is the setting of an action-packed scene in the popular novel The Da Vinci Code. In chapters 83, 85 and 86, Robert Langdon, Sophie Neveau and Leigh Teabing arrive at the Temple Church pursuing the answer to their latest riddle:

“In London lies a knight a Pope interred.
His labour's fruit a Holy wrath incurred.
You seek the orb that ought be on his tomb.
It speaks of Rosy flesh and seeded womb.”

London's historic legal district, with its professional class of independent lawyers, has parallels with the way medieval Islamic law was organised. In Sunni Islam there were four great schools of legal theory, which were often housed in "madrassas" around mosques. Scholars debated each other on obscure points of law, in much the same way as English barristers do.




Lamb Court

There is a theory that the Templars modelled the Inns of Court on Muslim ideas. But Mr Griffith-Jones suggests it is pretty unlikely the Templars imported the madrassa system to England. They were suppressed after 1314 - yet lawyers only started congregating in the Inns of Court after the 1360s.

Today the Inns are co-operative non incorporated businesses’ which provide the infrastructure and setting for the legal profession. The act as legal schools with colleges of law, libraries and legal bookshops and stationers. Their chapels and halls generally resonate to a full programme of cultural events with each Inn having musical and choral societies and their chapels and catering facilities being available for weddings and social events. In summer in the wonderful gardens within the Inns marquees are often erected and open air theatrical and musical events take place in these unique surroundings. And whilst these are private areas all grant public access for these are villages for the legal community and the notices are often stated in the inverse with excruciating politeness as in “The Public are welcome in these gardens in the months of May, June, July and August between the hours of 12 noon and 3.30 in the afternoon.” If you have not seen the Inns of Court you have not seen London and with their wonderful buildings, gardens, courtyards and sense of history they can provide a rewarding day or two all on their own.




OPENING TIMES

Grays Inn Gardens, Lincoln's Inn Gardens & Lincoln's Inn Chapel are open 12-2:30 on weekdays:

Middle Temple Gardens are open weekdays 12 - 3 May – September

Temple Church is generally open 11-4 Wed – Fri

Prince Henry's Room is open 11-2 Mon – Fri

The Royal Courts of Justice are open 9-4:30 Mon - Fri (security checks - certain items may not be taken into the building including cameras)
Middle & Inner Temple Gardens usually open on London Garden Squares Day.

Middle Temple Hall MAY be open 10-11:30 & 3-4 (check on 020 7427 4800).

Guided tours can be arranged for small groups by written request to The Treasury Office, Middle Temple Lane, EC4Y 9AT.