The Inns of Court

by Cecil Headlam

‘Nothing else in London,’ so Nathaniel Hawthorne noted, ‘is so like the effect of a spell as to pass under one of these archways and find yourself transported from the jumble, rush, tumult, uproar, as of an age of weekdays condensed into the present hour, into what seems an eternal Sabbath. It is very strange to find so much of ancient quietude right in the monster city’s very jaws—which yet the monster shall not eat up—right in its very belly indeed, which yet in all these ages it shall not digest and convert into the same substance as the rest of its bustling streets.’

Yet the site of Gray’s Inn lies outside the City Boundary, and the Chambers, where Francis Bacon wrote, were set in a quiet spot amidst gardens, beyond which stretched Gray’s Inn Fields, intersected by the country roads of Holborn and Gray’s Inn Lane. The latter lane took the name of Theobald’s Road later, because it led to Theobalds in Hertfordshire, which was the favourite hunting seat of King James I. In these fields beyond Gray’s Inn Lord Berkeley’s hounds showed sport to the Gentlemen of the Inns of Court in the reign of Queen Mary.

It is indeed difficult to realize and remember how small London was, how comparatively tiny even the ‘Great Wen,’ which moved Cobbett’s wrath and disgust, and how recent is the growth of that continuous monotony of streets, which have spread over the fields where our grandfathers shot snipe and partridges. Even at the beginning of the last century Gray’s Inn was a ‘private place in the suburbs,’ suitable for study, removed from the bustle of the City. ‘The moment the sun peeps out,’ wrote Sir Samuel Romilly from his Chambers in 1780, ‘I am in the country, having only one row of houses between me and Highgate and Hampstead.’

There is a popular legend that Gray’s Inn derives its name from the Grey Friars, whose Church stood hard by. But this legend is not in any way supported by the probabilities. Gray’s Inn, in fact, was the Inn, hospitium, or dwelling-house of the Greys of Wilton. Its site was included in the Manor of Portpool, the name of which survives in Portpool Lane. The name of this Manor is derived from Port (= market or gate), and pool, just as in West Smithfield there was a pool called Horsepool.[59] The ‘market-pool’ in question may have been that in the northern Courtyard of Staple Inn, or somewhere else on the property of the De Greys.

A very large portion of the Hundred of Ossulston, in which Gray’s Inn lies, appears to have belonged to the Bishop and Canons of St. Paul’s, and from the Manor of Portpool an ancient prebend of St. Paul’s Cathedral takes its name.

The exact date when the De Greys first came into possession of the Manor of Portpool is not certain. But Reginald de Grey died in 1308, according to an Inquisition taken after his death at ‘Purtpole,’ seized of a messuage and certain lands there, which he held of the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul, London, by rent, service, and suit.

This Reginald de Grey was Justiciar of Chester, whose work would often bring him to the Capital. It is reasonable to suppose that his following of clerks and lawyers would, as in the case of the Earl of Lincoln, be resident in his London ‘Inn,’ and thus form the nucleus of what afterwards developed into a School, Guild, or Society of Lawyers.

The Society of Gray’s Inn probably came into corporate existence some time in the fourteenth century. The exact date cannot, indeed, be determined. As in the case of the other Inns, the known surviving records are scanty. And this, perhaps, is due to the same cause.

Fire wrought havoc in Gray’s Inn, as elsewhere, and the earliest archives of this Inn, as of the Temple, were probably destroyed at the end of the seventeenth century. In 1687 we learn that, ‘as they were in the midst of their revels and masquerades, a violent fire broke out, which destroyed most of the paper buildings that remained; several records are also lost and burnt or blown up.’

Such early records as do exist of the Inn as a corporate institution in its early days do not amount to convincing evidence, but they do point to the existence of Gray’s Inn as an Inn of Court in the fourteenth century. A list of the Readers of the Inn, with their Arms, from the year 1359, compiled in the reign of Henry VIII. (Harleian MSS.), we may take for what it is worth. It is said that William Skipwith, a Serjeant-at-Law in 1355, belonged to Gray’s Inn, and was the first Reader. Again, in 1589, Sir Christopher Yelverton, in resigning his membership of Gray’s Inn, as it was compulsory for him to do on being appointed a Serjeant-at-Law, made a farewell speech to his brother members, stating that ‘I doe acknowledge myself deeplie and infinitely indebted unto this House for the singular and exceeding favours that I and myne ancestors have received in it ... for two hundred years agoe at least some of them lived here.’ This statement, if accurate, would prove the Inn to have been a corporate institution at least as early as 1389. Again, we gather from the ‘Paston Letters’ that Sir William Byllyng, Chief Justice in 1464, told William Paston that he had been ‘a felaw in Gray’s Inn,’ and also mentioned one Ledam as a ‘felaw’ there. This is the first, and for many years the last, mention of any Fellows in Gray’s Inn. It may either be considered to be a confirmation of the view that the Lawyers’ Society was in possession in the fifteenth century, or merely a proof that Byllyng himself and Ledam were fellow-lodgers in some part of Lord Grey’s tenement. But there is, in fact, no indubitable mention of the Lawyers’ settlement here until the time of Henry VIII. However, the great-grandson of the Justiciar, Reginald de Wilton, leased out the hospitium in Pourtepole in 1343. And in 1370 Lord Grey de Wilton let ‘a certain Inn in Portepole’ for 100 shillings. Stow, on the authority of one Master Saintlow Kniveton, says that gentlemen and professors of the Common Law were Lord Grey’s tenants. At any rate, before the end of the fourteenth century (1397) the records show that the Lords de Grey had enfeoffed others—who possibly represented the Society of the Inn—with the use of their property. Then, in 1506, Edmund, Lord de Grey, decided to part with it altogether. He was perhaps persuaded to adopt this course by the fact that the suburban villa of the De Greys was by this time already being swamped by the rising tide of houses that was flowing westward from the City. He sold to Hugh Denys and others ‘the Manor of Portpoole, otherwise called Gray’s Inn, four messuages, four gardens, the site of a windmill, eight acres of land, ten shillings of free rent, and the advowson of the Chantry of Portpoole aforesaid.’