It remains to mention the Northern wing of Lincoln’s Inn, the rectangular Court which lines Chancery Lane on the one side and faces the green sward of the Garden on the other. ‘The Terrace walk,’ says Herbert (p. 301) truly enough, ‘forms an uncommonly fine promenade ... and the gardens themselves, adorned with a number of fine, stately trees, receive a sort of consequence from the grandeur of the adjoining pile.’ This is Stone Building, and is the outcome of a design to rebuild the whole Inn in 1780 in the Palladian style. The design was not carried out, and even this section of the undertaking remained incomplete for sixty years. Even now much of the building is of brown brick. In 1845 Hardwick, who was then carrying out his fine Gothic design for the Hall, completed the façade commenced by Sir Robert Taylor. The fine Corinthian pilasters of freestone, the simple pediments, and the chaste greys and pearly whites of the plain stone, thrown into strong relief by the soot-blackened portions of the building where it is not exposed to the cleansing effect of wind and rain, render this nobly-proportioned
STONE BUILDINGS, LINCOLN’S INN, FROM THE GARDENS
Commenced in 1780 as part of a great scheme of rebuilding the whole Inn in the Palladian style. The illustration shows the so-called ‘Pitt’ sundial.
Court delightful to the eye, and, contrasting with the warm reds of the other buildings in Lincoln’s Inn, convince one, if one needs convincing, that red-brick and Portland stone are the only materials suitable for London architecture.
In the Eastern wing of Stone Buildings is the Drill Hall of the Inns of Court Volunteers, and here are preserved various memorials of the many Volunteer Associations which have been connected with the Inns of Court.
So far back as the time of the Spanish Armada an armed force was raised amongst the barristers and officers of the Inns for the defence of the country.
A copy of the original deed of this association of lawyers to resist the threatened invasion (1584), relating to Lincoln’s Inn, hangs in the Drill Hall. The original is still in possession of the Earl of Ellesmere, whose ancestor, Thomas Egerton, then Solicitor-General and afterwards Chancellor, was the first to sign it.
Upon the arrest of the Five Members in 1642, five hundred warlike Lawyers marched down to Westminster to express their determination to protect their Sovereign, Charles I.