‘There is both in the Inns of Court and the Inns of Chancery,’ says Fortescue, ‘a sort of an Academy or Gymnasium fit for persons of their station, where they learn singing and all kinds of music, dancing and Revels.’ These forms of recreation constituted, indeed, the lighter side of the educational and social life of the Inns.
All-Hallowe’en, Candlemas, and Ascension Day, were the grand days for ‘dancing, revelling, and musick,’ when, before the Judges and Benchers seated at the upper end of the Hall, the Utter Barristers and Inner Barristers performed ‘a solemn revel,’ which was followed by a post-revel, when ‘some of the Gentlemen of the Inner-Barr do present the House with dancing.’[13] On occasions of more particular festivity, even so great dignitaries as the Lord-Chancellor, the Justices, Serjeants, and Benchers, would dance round the coal fire which blazed beneath the louvre in the centre of the Hall, whilst the verses of the Song of the House rang out in rousing chorus, like the song of the Mallard of All Souls, at Oxford.
Dugdale gives the order of the Christmas ceremonies in delightful detail: ‘At night, before supper, are revels and dancing, and so also after supper, during the twelve daies of Christmas. The antientest Master of the Revels is after dinner and supper to sing a carol or song, and command other gentlemen then there present to sing with him and the company.’ On Christmas Day ‘Service in the Church ended, the gentlemen presently repair into the Hall, to breakfast with Brawn, Mustard and Malmsey,’ and so forth. The good-fellowship and the long evenings of Christmastide had natural issue in the production of plays and masques in these Halls, by students who have always been in close touch with the drama. It is not surprising, therefore, that one of Shakespeare’s plays was written for Twelfth Night, and first produced by the students of Law, at the Temple, for this merry and convivial season (see [Chapter IV].).
On St. Stephen’s Day the Lord of Misrule was abroad, and at dinner and afterwards games and pageants were performed about the fire that burned in the centre of the Hall, and whence the smoke escaped through the open chimney in the roof. For instance: ‘Then cometh in the Master of the Game apparelled in green velvet, and the Ranger of the Forest also, in a green suit of satten, bearing in his hand a green bow and divers arrows, with either of them a hunting horn about their necks; blowing together three blasts of Venery, they pace round about the fire three times.’ They make obeisance to the Lord Chancellor, and then ‘a Huntsman cometh into the Hall, with a Fox and a Purse-net, with a Cat, both bound at the end of a staff, and with them nine or ten couple of Hounds. And the Fox and Cat are by the Hounds set upon, and killed beneath the fire’ (Dugdale).
The Post Revels, we are told, were ‘performed by the better sort of the young gentlemen of the Societies, with Galliards, Corrantoes, or else with Stage-plays.’ Masques were frequently performed by the members of the Inns, and Sir Christopher Hatton first obtained Queen Elizabeth’s favour by his appearance in a masque prepared by the lawyers.
Besides the solemnities of Christmas and Readers’ Feasts, the Antique Masques and Revelries, as Wynne in his ‘Eunomus’ observes (ii., p. 253), ‘introduced upon extraordinary occasions, as to the grandeur of the preparations, the dignity of the performers and of the spectators, at which our Kings and Queens have condescended to be so often present, seem to have exceeded every public exhibition of the kind.’
One famous masque was presented by the four Inns of Court to Charles I. and Henrietta (1633), which cost some £24,000. So pleased were the King and Queen with ‘the noble bravery of it,’ and the answer implied in it to Prynne’s ‘Histrio Mastix,’ that they returned the compliment by inviting 120 gentlemen of the Inns of Court to the masque at Whitehall on Shrove Tuesday.
If these and other old customs have fallen into abeyance, the traditional spirit of sociability is far from being dead, and on ‘Grand Nights’ their old habit of hospitality is gratefully revived by the Inns of Court in favour of famous men, who are honoured as their guests.
CHAPTER II
THE KNIGHTS TEMPLARS AND THEIR SUCCESSORS
About the year 1118 certain noblemen, horsemen, religiously bent, bound themselves by vow in the hands of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, ‘to serve Christ after the manner of Regular Canons in chastity and obedience, and to renounce their owne proper willes for ever.’