“Capitalis Justitiarius,” says an antient MS. account of the creation of serjeants-at-law in the reign of Henry the Seventh, “monstrabat eis plura bona exempla de eorum prædecessoribus, et tunc posuit les coyfes[585] super eorum capitibus, et induebat eos singulariter de capital de skarletto, et sic creati fuerunt servientes ad legem.” In his admonitory exhortation, the chief justice displays to them the moral and religious duties of their profession. “Ambulate in vocatione in quâ vocati estis.... Disce cultum Dei, reverentiam superioris(!), misericordiam pauperi.” He tells them the coif is sicut vestis candida et immaculata, the emblem of purity and virtue, and he commences a portion of his discourse in the scriptural language used by the popes in the famous bull conceding to the Templars their vast spiritual and temporal privileges, “Omne datum optimum et omne donum perfectum desursum est descendens a patre luminum, &c. &c.!”[586]
The freres serjens of the Temple were strictly enjoined to “eat their bread in silence,” and “place a watch upon their mouths,” and the freres serjens of the law, we are told, after their admission, did “dyne together with sober countenance and lytel communycacion.”
The common-law lawyers, after their location in the Temple, continued rapidly to increase, and between the reigns of Richard the Second and Henry the Sixth, they divided themselves into two bodies. “In the raigne of king Henry the Sixth,” says the MS. account of the Temple, written 9 Charles the First, “they were soe multiplied and grown into soe great a bulke as could not conveniently be regulated into one society, nor indeed was the old hall capable of containing so great a number, whereupon they were forced to divide themselves. A new hall was then erected which is now the Junior Temple Hall, whereunto divers of those who before took their repast and diet in the old hall resorted, and in process of time became a distinct and divided society.”
From the inquisition taken 10. E. III. A. D. 1337, it appears that in the time of the Knights Templars there were two halls in the Temple, so that it is not likely that a fresh one was built. One of these halls, the present Inner Temple Hall, had been assigned, the year previous to the taking of that inquisition, to the prior and brethren of the Hospital of Saint John, together with the church, cloisters, &c., as before mentioned, whilst the other hall remained in the hands of the crown, and was not granted to the Hospitallers until 13 E. III. A. D. 1340. It was probably soon after this period that the Hospitallers conceded the use of both halls to the professors of the law, and these last, from dining apart and being attached to different halls, at last separated into two societies, as at present.
“Although there be two several societies, yet in sundry places they are promiscuously lodged together without any metes or bounds to distinguish them, and the ground rooms in some places belong to the new house, and the upper rooms to the old one, a manifest argument that both made at first but one house, nor did they either before or after this division claim by several leases, but by one entire grant. And as they took their diet apart, so likewise were they stationed apart in the church, viz. those of the Middle Temple on the left hand side as you go therein, and those of the old house on the right hand side, and so it remains between them at this day.”[587]
Burton, the antiquary, who wrote in the reign of queen Elizabeth, speaks of this “old house” (the Inner Temple) as “the mother and most antient of all the other houses of courts, to which,” says he, “I must acknowledge all due respect, being a fellow thereof, admitted into the same society on the 20th of May, 1593.”[588] The two societies of the Temple are of equal antiquity; the members in the first instance dined together in one or other of the antient halls of the Templars as it suited their convenience and inclination; and to this day, in memory of the old custom, the benchers or antients of the one society dine once every year in the hall of the other society. The period of the division has been generally referred to the commencement of the reign of Henry the Sixth, as at the close of that long reign the present four Inns of Court were all in existence, and then contained about two thousand students. The Court of King’s Bench, the Court of Exchequer, and the Court of Chancery, had then encroached upon the jurisdiction of the Common Pleas, and had taken cognizance of civil causes between subject and subject, which were formerly decided in that court alone.[589] The legal business of the country had consequently greatly increased, the profession of the law became highly honourable, and the gentry and the nobility considered the study of it a necessary part of education.
Sir John Fortescue, who was chief justice of the King’s Bench during half the reign of Henry the Sixth, in his famous discourse de laudibus legum Angliæ, tells us that in his time the annual expenses of each law-student amounted to more than 28l., (equal to about 450l. of our present money,) that all the students of the law were gentlemen by birth and fortune, and had great regard for their character and honour; that in each Inn of Court there was an academy or gymnasium, where singing, music, and dancing, and a variety of accomplishments, were taught. Law was studied at stated periods, and on festival days: after the offices of the church were over, the students employed themselves in the study of history, and in reading the Holy Scriptures. Everything good and virtuous was there taught, vice was discouraged and banished, so that knights, barons, and the greatest of the nobility of the kingdom, placed their sons in the Temple and the other Inns of Court; and not so much, he tells us, to make the law their study, or to enable them to live by the profession, as to form their manners and to preserve them from the contagion of vice. “Quarrelling, insubordination, and murmuring, are unheard of; if a student dishonours himself, he is expelled the society; a punishment which is dreaded more than imprisonment and irons, for he who has been driven from one society is never admitted into any of the others; whence it happens, that there is a constant harmony amongst them, the greatest friendship, and a general freedom of conversation.”
The two societies of the Temple are now distinguished by the several denominations of the Inner and the Middle Temple, names that appear to have been adopted with reference to a part of the antient Temple, which, in common with other property of the Knights Templars, never came into the hands of the Hospitallers. After the lawyers of the Temple had separated into two bodies and occupied distinct portions of ground, this part came to be known by the name of the outward Temple, as being the farthest away from the city, and is thus referred to in a manuscript in the British Museum, written in the reign of James the First.—“A third part, called outward Temple, was procured by one Dr. Stapleton, bishop of Exeter, in the days of king Edward the Second, for a residing mansion-house for him and his successors, bishops of that see. It was called Exeter Inn until the reign of the late queen Mary, when the lord Paget, her principal secretary of state, obtained the said third part, called Exeter-house, to him and his heirs, and did re-edify the same. After whom the said third part of the Templar’s house came to Thomas late duke of Norfolk, and was by him conveyed to Sir Robert Dudley, knight, earl of Leicester, who bequeathed the same to Sir Robert Dudley, knight, his son, and lastly, by purchase, came to Robert late earl of Essex, who died in the reign of the late queen Elizabeth, and is still called Essex-house.”[590]
When the lawyers came into the Temple, they found engraved upon the antient buildings the armorial bearings of the Knights Templars, which were, on a shield argent, a plain cross gules, and (brochant sur le tout) the holy lamb bearing the banner of the order, surmounted by a red cross. These arms remained the emblem of the Temple until the fifth year of the reign of queen Elizabeth, when unfortunately the society of the Inner Temple, yielding to the advice and persuasion of Master Gerard Leigh, a member of the College of Heralds, abandoned the antient and honourable device of the Knights Templars, and assumed in its place a galloping winged horse called a Pegasus, or, as it has been explained to us, “a horse striking the earth with its hoof, or Pegasus luna on a field argent!” Master Gerard Leigh, we are told, “emblazoned them with precious stones and planets, and by these strange arms he intended to signify that the knowledge acquired at the learned seminary of the Inner Temple would raise the professors of the law to the highest honours, adding, by way of motto, volat ad æthera virtus, and he intended to allude to what are esteemed the more liberal sciences, by giving them Pegasus forming the fountain of Hippocrene, by striking his hoof against the rock, as a proper emblem of lawyers becoming poets, as Chaucer and Gower, who were both of the Temple!”
The society of the Middle Temple, with better taste, still preserves, in that part of the Temple over which its sway extends, the widely-renowned and time-honoured badge of the antient order of the Temple.